


Fawns and Snakelets

by SpaceWall



Series: To Take Another Course [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (because fuck JKR and all that she stands for), (partially), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boy-Who-Lived Neville Longbottom, Canon Era, Epistolary, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Marauders, Parenthood, Protective Siblings, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:22:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: After the end of the war, Severus, Lily, and James dust themselves off and raise their (and Frank and Alice’s) children.--Lily looked down at the letter again. “Do you think they’re going to be alright?”In spite of everything, they had four incredible, brave, kind, good children. “I think so.”
Relationships: Harry Potter & Severus Snape, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter/Severus Snape, James Potter/Severus Snape, Lily Evans Potter/Severus Snape, Luna Lovegood/OFC, Neville Longbottom & Severus Snape, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: To Take Another Course [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945066
Comments: 48
Kudos: 174





	1. Years -10-2

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: canon-typical violence (inc. against children), canon-typical trauma probably more explicitly depicted (eg cruciatus curse + aftereffects, possession)
> 
> NO author-typical transphobia. And if you don’t understand why JKR’s transphobic bullshit is bad, and the very opposite of feminist, you can fuck right off my fic. Link in the end-note to a UK-based organization to support trans and gender-diverse kids.

When Severus came in from the garden shed, where he’d been holed-up for hours working on a particularly difficult pet project – using the basic principles of muggle chemistry, he wanted to see if he could determine what about Monkshood, exactly, was the element that was toxic to Werewolves, in an effort to determine if a similar but less toxic substitute might be identified – he found Regulus sitting at the kitchen table with his head buried in his hands. 

Regulus was their secret-keeper, and, consequently, the only other person they’d seen in months. It wasn’t the first time Severus had come inside or downstairs to find him, but it was the first time he’d seen Regulus look so worn. James wasn’t there either, but Lily, he saw through the open doorway, was curled on the sofa, breathing raggedly.

“Is Sirius…” There were few things that could have left Regulus and Lily in such a state. Even Remus, he didn’t think, would have made Regulus cry like that. 

He shook his head slightly. James, coming back downstairs with Harry perched on his hip, wasn’t crying, although it looked as if he might have been. That meant that Sirius was certainly fine. 

“It’s over,” he said, with the weight of worlds behind his words. Severus thought he’d gained grey hairs over the course of their time waiting. “Frank and Alice are dead.”

No wonder Lily was so distraught. Alice had become one of her best friends over the course of the war. But Regulus… it didn’t make sense. 

The final piece only fell into place when Regulus lifted his head and said, “it was Barty. He was the other secret keeper. They didn’t think anyone would expect it to be him and I trusted him and-“

Severus pulled him into a fierce hug, letting Regulus cover him in tears and snot in lieu of actually saying anything comforting. Barty Crouch had been Regulus’s only remaining Slytherin friend. It had been Regulus who had recruited him for the order, brought him into the fold, nurtured the oddball friendship between him, and Frank, and Alice. The awfulness of this was worse than anything Severus himself had ever experienced. 

“And Neville?” Lily’s godson, just the same age as Harry. They’d been meant to grow up together in a peaceful world. Someday, when this all ended and they were allowed to leave the little protective bubble around their house. That future now seemed further away than ever. 

Harry said something to James. It was obvious that he could sense how upset they all were.

“That’s just it,” Lily said from the couch, voice raspy, “Neville’s alive. The Prophecy was right. He’s gone.”

There was no question which ‘he’ she meant. “How?”

Regulus, against his shoulder, said, “I don’t know, but I don’t trust it.”

After so long, Severus didn’t think he would trust it until he saw Voldemort dead by his own hands.

“What does Dumbledore say?”

He must have been the one to send Regulus, after all. 

“He says you’re safe, for now.”

\--

The worst thing by far about St. Mungo’s was the smell. It wasn’t like muggle hospitals, which he knew from visiting Lily’s parents near the end, reeked of disinfectant. It was subtle enough that someone who wasn’t a potioneer might not ever have been able to detect the way all the potions mingled together in the air. To Severus’s trained senses, it was rather overwhelming as his mind struggled to keep up with the meaning behind every scent.

“This is shit.” Lily pressed a paper coffee cup into his hand and sat beside him on the bench. She pulled her own cup – it smelled like hot chocolate, with a sickening amount of whipped cream – out of the carrying tray and vanished the tray with a petty vigor. 

“I thought you were taking Harry and Neville home.”

The children weren’t anywhere in sight. “I was. But to be honest… I wasn’t in any state to look after them. So I floo-called Augusta and asked her if she could take them for the night.”

“You really shouldn’t be here anyways. You need a good night’s sleep, love.”

At seven-and-a-half months pregnant, the last thing Lily needed was to spend all night sitting on an uncomfortable bench in St. Mungo’s. 

She leaned against him until Severus put his arm around her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have gotten a good night’s sleep at home either.”

The truth was, there wasn’t anything either of them could do. They weren’t healers. Not this kind of healer, anyways. Severus had spent the last several hours replaying his entire career, wondering if he could have found time to study emergency healing, more mental magics, more anything helpful. Regulus wasn’t as good at potions as he was, and Regulus could help. Severus’s mind contorted itself with guilt. Fat lot of good all of his work with Damocles would do for Remus now.

It was supposed to have been over. They were supposed to have been safe. Severus wished, more than anything, that he had killed Bellatrix Lestrange when he’d last run into her in a fight. He’d almost come close, but Voldemort had shown up and they’d run. Now, Severus wished he’d stayed to finish the job. Even then, he’d known she deserved it from the way she’d helped abuse Regulus and Sirius as children. 

“Did you tell James and Regulus that you were staying?”

Regulus was inside, assisting the healers. They hadn’t wanted to let him, but he’d been Lupin’s primary healer since he graduated, so they didn’t have much choice in the matter. 

“Mm. I brought James, Hope and Lyall coffee too. Hence the tray. I think the woman in the Muggle coffeeshop thought very badly of you all for having the pregnant woman get you coffee.”

James was doing disaster management with the Lupins. Somehow, in their moment of complete crisis, he’d gained a preternatural calm that unsettled Severus terribly. Even though he was far less close to Sirius and Remus than James was, he hadn’t been able to take the tension of the waiting room proper. The smell, even worse inside that out here that lead onto the muggle street, was only a part of it. Something about seeing Hope and Lyall so upset had made it all worse. 

“Did you want to go back in and be with them?”

“Sometime.”

It was all so fucking pointless. The war was over. It was over, and there had been no reason at all for the Lestranges to try and take one last strike against the Order. If they hadn’t, they might even have gotten away with it like some of the other wealthy pureblood deatheaters were likely to. As it was, all of them were going away for a very long time. 

They’d been caught red-handed, was the thing. In one of life’s great ironies, Sirius had been saved by his mother. She and Sirius had been planning to meet to negotiate a détente of the family feud. When he’d been late, she’d sent Kreacher to harass him, and Kreacher had fetched the aurors. 

“This is fucking awful,” Severus said, mostly to himself. 

Remus had probably been the best of them, at the defense stuff especially, and Sirius had been good enough in his own right to survive the war. In a fair fight, rather than a surprise attack, there was no way they wouldn’t have been able to win. 

“We’re not going to give up on them,” replied Lily, to a thought he had never voiced. “Even if the healers say they aren’t going to recover, we’re going to fight it. You, and me, and Reg. We’re really fucking excellent wizards.”

When they were finally allowed in to see them, Remus propped up in bed, looking grim with a bottle of skele-gro on the bedside table and bandages wrapped all around his chest. 

Sirius, in Animagus form, was curled at his feet. James, in hushed tones, had told them that he didn’t seem willing or able to change back. Apparently, he’d shifted when Bellatrix had started using ‘crucio’. Nobody knew what, exactly, that was going to do to him. Regulus, who had retreated into position near the window, was staring at his brother with open grief. Hope Lupin, on the other hand, looked at her son with naked, giddy relief. Lyall’s face was a curated mask. 

“Here’s a puzzle for you, Scales,” Remus rasped, when he saw them, “does lycanthropy make you more resistant to the Cruciatus curse, or is my pain tolerance so completely fucking warped that I had no idea how severe it was.”

A good question, but right now, all of Severus’s intellectual curiosity had been wiped away in favour of naked relief. 

\--

Remus had been putting on a brave face for his parents, that first day. Most of the time, it wasn’t as good as that. For Sirius the struggle was more immediately visible, but Remus still spent most of his time in a state of fear and shock. Afterwards, all of them would wonder how they’d survived those first few months before and after Marlene Lily’s birth, when Sirius was Padfoot nine days out of ten, Regulus was halfway through his first year as a professor, Remus spent most of his time staring into space not saying anything, and James, Lily, and Severus had three babies to look after. Neville was a blessing, of course, but he had nightmares about things he couldn’t even remember, and that woke Harry and Marley, and then all of them were irritable for not having gotten enough sleep. Augusta helped when she could, but she had her seat on the Wizengamot, and her grief over losing Frank was debilitating. Hope and Lyall did the same, but Hope had become increasingly sick over the year. Yet another of these muggle illnesses that wizards had no idea what to do with. 

She died in May of that year, and nobody could get a word out of Remus for three days. Regulus quit his job to move in and look after Sirius and Remus, forcing Dumbledore to rehire Slughorn as substitute for the rest of the year. Severus thought he was going to have to do the same to help James look after the children while Lily was in her university classes, but by the end of April, Damocles took one look at him and told him not to so much as look at a cauldron for a month. 

It was keenly unfair, Severus thought, that the only living parents between the Marauders were Lyall – who, for all his love of Remus, had also been a traumatizing figure, with all his hangups about lycanthropy – Walpurga Black, and Severus’s father. The war had been hard for everyone, but it didn’t feel right that they’d lost so much so quickly. That they were so alone even when they were all together. 

They’d had other friends, once. Regulus had Barty. Lily had Alice. Severus had Marlene. Sirius had the Prewetts. There was a time when they wouldn’t have hesitated to call any of them. All gone now. Merlin spit on the war. 

But there was one member of their extended friend group who was still very much alive. And it was Kingsley who came, when they needed him most, hitching a ride with Lily back from one of their law school classes like Mary Poppins from that muggle movie that Lily and Neville loved. 

“You cannot possibly want to stay in this madhouse,” James said, but he’d handed over Marley so he could concentrate on an American book about the psychic effects of Animagus transformation. 

Kingsley was holding the baby with a confidence that indicated either younger siblings or cousins. It struck Severus that in more than a decade of knowing each other, he’d never asked. 

“Can it really be worse than living with the four of you for seven years at Hogwarts?”

Severus opened his mouth to say it could, considered a portion of the things they’d done, and said, “No, probably not.”

\--

In July, they had a breakthrough with Sirius. They’d found that he did better with other animagi, which was particularly inconvenient since Remus and Regulus were the only two people in the Marauders who weren’t. Regulus, never one to let his junior status in the friend group stop him, had mastered the Animagus transformation in record time, assuming the form of a black Maine Coon cat. 

After seeing him, Sirius had laughed so hard he’d cried. It was the first time he’d cried, since, and Severus, who’d been half-supervising half-jotting-down ingredients for a potion he thought might help Remus – something to temporarily enhance the effects of lycanthropy, rather than mitigate them, to see if his theory about it providing protection was true – had been allowed to hug Sirius in human form for the first time since, and he counted that as a victory all on its own.

\--

Harry and Neville turned two that summer, and on Halloween, they all raised their glasses to the memory of Frank and Alice Longbottom, except for Regulus who had returned to Hogwarts for a second attempt at his first year of teaching. 

After the children had been put to bed, and James and Sirius had gone to smoke in the back, Lily, Kingsley, Severus and Remus sat around the kitchen table, nursing their third bottle of wine. 

“Did you ever think this was what our lives were going to be like?” Asked Kingsley. He’d almost been killed by a trap in a raid on an old deatheater hideout last week. Severus, for one, was glad that Lily was pushing him towards a career on the legal practice, rather than the law enforcement, side of things.

Lily leaned back in her seat. “By the end of seventh year, I think I had some idea. I mean… Muggleborn, right? I knew that there were people who wanted me dead and I wasn’t going to fucking cower and hide. I was going to live my life. I just didn’t mean for anyone else to have to suffer with me.”

“Exactly,” said Remus, nodding. His eyes were focused on an empty spot on the table. “I knew my life was going to be a bit shit. But honestly… I always thought I’d do it alone. I still don’t know if it’s easier or harder this way.”

On the one hand, he had them to fall back on, always and unconditionally. On the other hand, he’d been forced to watch the person he loved most in the world suffer tremendously. That was a fate Severus wouldn’t wish on anyone. 

“Severus?”

How to answer without sounding a little pathetic? Well, hell, she’d married him. It couldn’t be pathetic if you actually got the girl. “Summer before seventh year, Regulus and I decided that he was going to spend the war looking after Sirius and Remus so they didn’t get murdered while they were snogging, and I was going to do the same for Lily and James. The rest of it was a bit of a surprise.”

Remus laughed, while Lily tapped Severus’s leg with her foot under the table in a silent gesture of support and love. 

Trying to keep the focus off his reddening face – seriously, how could he have said something so sappy – Severus asked, “and you, Kingsley?”

He looked surprisingly maudlin. “I mean… I had other friends, in school. But half of them are dead now and the other half either ignored the war or were on the wrong side of it. And now I’m stuck with the fact that all of them either didn’t know that my mother is a half-blood or knew and somehow thought I was better just because my father’s family is in the Sacred Twenty-Eight.”

Kingsley hadn’t really been their friend, in school. By seventh year, they’d sat together in some classes, but that was after lines had already been drawn in the sand between Death Eaters and cowards and mugglesborns and their allies. Before that, Severus remembered him being socially popular, friends with students with serious academic interests in basically every house. As a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, the Slytherins had been willing to respect him even if he was a Gryffindor and his father was one of the more blood-traitor-y members of the lot. They still weren’t nearly as uncouth as the Weasleys or the Potters. Or, these days, the Longbottoms and the Blacks. James, who hated the entire institution with a terrible passion, was very smug about the number of families who were now either blood-traitors or, as in the cases of the Lestranges and the Crouchs, well on their ways to being extinct. 

“Those ones don’t sound like very good friends,” Lily said, after a moment where Kingsley’s words lingered in the air. “You were always a better friend than people deserved – us especially.”

He’d protected their secrets long before they’d been anything but a nuisance to him. They’d made his time as a prefect utterly chaotic, had destroyed half the dorm with pranks and general slovenliness on Sirius and James’s parts, and had generally caused mayhem. And he hadn’t ratted out Remus for being a werewolf, or the rest of them for being illegal animagi. They’d owed Kingsley blood debts long before he’d shown up with his great-aunt’s hideous bag and offered to help them.

Kingsley looked between them. Muggleborn, half-blood, werewolf. “In my experience, people very rarely get what we deserve. It’s better to be kinder than someone deserves than it is to be crueler.” 

Severus would happily drink to that.

\--

A year and a half after that, they had their third and final child. A daughter, though they didn’t know it at the time. Jennifer Sarah. They all agreed that four was a more than appropriate number to stop at. Neville and Jenny were always closest. Even when she was small, Neville was far more interested in the baby than anyone else was. Severus was quietly happy about it, even if he sometimes wondered if he should be ashamed to take such profound joy in having Alice and Neville’s son in their care. The cost of this happiness had, after all, been high. 

Marley and Harry got on well too, if in a different way than Jenny and Neville. They both liked quidditch, and they played together a lot when it was just the four of them, but they both liked the Weasley siblings that were closest to them in age much better than they liked each other. 

Severus was always on edge, in the back of his mind. Waiting for Voldemort to come back, or something else profoundly terrible to happen, but it never did. Dumbledore seemed to have some concerns, and insisted they send Neville to live with his grandmother for some obscure reason, but Lily refused point blank and that was the end of. Augusta didn’t want that any more than they did, and she was involved in Neville’s life as much as worked for all of them. She came to Sunday dinners, and Neville went to stay with her for three weeks every summer. The last summer before Neville and Harry went to Hogwarts, Jenny, all of seven years old and eight months after she’d told them that she was a girl, had insisted she was going too. Augusta, very generously, had agreed to put up with it for the last week of Neville’s visit, and they’d apparently had a very good time, even if Jenny had blown up a pudding on one of Neville’s relatives for being rude to him. Lily had given her a scolding for that when she’d come back, but James had been too amused and Severus too pleased with her taking a stand for the scolding to really have an effect. And that was how the last summer before the boys – Ron Weasley honorarily included in their number – went to Hogwarts.

\--

_Dear Mum, Dad, and Papa,  
And Jenny-Jens and Marls!_

_Neville and Ron and I are all in Gryffindor! It’s awesome! There are five of us in the room. Seamus and Dean, who are both halfbloods, are the other two. We met some of the girls on the train too. One of them is called Hermione and she is the worst ever. Ron agrees. I think Neville likes her though so don’t tell him I said that. _

_Have to go now – Neville is taking these to the Owlery. Hopefully the map will keep him from getting lost!_

_Love!_

_Harry_

\--

With the boys gone it was… oddly quiet, especially when Marley and Jenny went over to play with Ginny or to the pre-Hogwarts school that Severus had found for them. He hadn’t wanted any of them spending all their time alone like he had as a child. With Lily off at the Ministry most of the time, and Severus in the professional lab he shared with Damocles, James found himself without anything to occupy his time for the first time since graduation. 

In October, Severus and Lily both took a day off work, and the three of them took a portkey to Wales to go on a hike. It was one of just a handful of proper dates they’d managed to have in years. 

James packed a picnic. Lily remembered the blanket. Severus brought the wine. 

They talked, for a long time. About the kids, about their work, and Kingsley’s new girlfriend who was a muggle social worker. And, naturally, the conversation turned towards James’s plans. 

He and Sirius and Kingsley had all been planning on becoming Aurors, once. Kingsley had changed his mind, reading about magical law after finding out the truth about Remus. He’d decided that, like Lily, he wanted to change laws and defend people rather than enforce them. Sirius, for his part, had been robbed of that chance by Bellatrix Lestrange, the way his hands still shook sometimes, and he spent the worst days as a dog. But James had given it up for love. To raise their children and help their friends. Lily and Severus, who had been raised as muggles in this regard, still sometimes found it odd that they’d acquired a house-husband. 

James, conversely, didn’t seem to mind. “I think I would have been an excellent auror,” he said, when Lily had raised the topic, “maybe I still would be. But being there, for the kids… I wouldn’t trade a second of it.”

“And when Jenny goes to Hogwarts?”

James’s cheeks had coloured lightly. “I was going to tell you. I just hadn’t worked out how, yet.” They both waited, patiently, until he said, “Minnie has been helping me apply to complete my mastery in transfiguration. I don’t know what I’ll do when I have it, exactly, but it’ll be nice to have. That and the Wizengamot will be more than enough.”

James’s transfiguration was such an enormous gift. There had always been a trickle of guilt that Severus had been able to pursue his great gift of potioneering and James hadn’t had the same chance.

Lily, for both of them, said, “That is wonderful.”

\--

_Harry James Potter,_

_Risking your life, facing a troll! What were you thinking? The letter from Professor McGonagall nearly scared all of us half to death! Thank goodness Neville came home for Halloween._

_I know you went after Neville’s friend Hermione, and that was very brave indeed. But next time, please go get a teacher. For the sake of your Uncle Remus’s heart._

_All my Love,_

_Dad_

\--

Ron came to stay with them that Christmas, while his parents were away. It was a rowdy affair, with five children in the house, and all the marauders reunited. Even Regulus managed to get away for Christmas, after some time spent needling Dumbledore. As had been a great source of amusement for all of them, Harry had gone from hating the smartest Witch in Gryffindor to being her friend. That, and his fighting the troll, and the fight with young Mr. Malfoy that had won him his position as the youngest Seeker in living memory, seemed to have taken up all the air in the room.

On Christmas eve, Severus found Neville sitting outside, wrapped in his thickest muggle winter jacket.

“Your Uncle James is making Cocoa inside, if you want some.” With the offer made, Severus took the seat beside him and waited for Neville to say what was on his mind.

“Do you ever think Harry should have been the chosen one, instead of me?”

Severus put his arm around their godson. It seemed not so long ago that he’d been able to carry Neville in just one arm. 

“No.”

They’d never told Neville about the prophecy, about the fact that it could have applied to both of them. It didn’t seem like knowledge that could have done anyone any good. 

“But Harry’s just… better, at everything.”

“And how’s his herbology been, lately?”

Normally that would have gotten a laugh out of Neville, but he just sighed. “I’m terrible at potions, and transfiguration, charms, and flying, and everything.”

“You aren’t terrible at potions. I’ve seen you helping James with the cooking hundreds of times.”

“Ask Uncle Regulus. I’ve blown something up in basically every single one of his classes all year. Cooking is different. It isn’t magic. I’m terrible at magic.”

“Neville, look at me.” He seemed to Severus to be trying very hard not to cry. “You are magic. Every single thing you do is magic. I’ve seen you casting spells while you cook, just the same as James does.” He muttered something noncommittal. “How many times would Jenny have to blow something up in potions before you declared her a failure?”

Neville looked so singularly appalled at the idea that Severus had to laugh, a little. Rather petulantly, he crossed his arms and said, “it isn’t the same.”

It was always easier to be kind to the people you loved than to yourself. Severus knew that from experience. He stood, throwing off the snow that had settled on his cloak, and offered his hand to Neville. “Would you like to come into my workroom with me?”

Neville’s eyes had gone very wide. He knew very well that only Regulus and Lily were generally allowed in Severus’s home laboratory. He didn’t keep anything truly dangerous there – that was saved for work – but there were sensitive experiments that were easy to disturb. Not a single one of them was as important as this. 

Neville was good at cooking magic. He was bad at potions class. The trick, really, was to close the gap between the two. Severus conjured up a blackboard, wrote out a set of instructions, and, instead of looming as a teacher, followed through them at Neville’s side, showing him every step of the way while chatting about some inconsequential thing, a Weird Sisters album and Neville’s friend Susan. When they were done, cauldrons bubbling, Neville was almost smiling.

“Congratulations,” Severus said, “you’ve just completed a third year potion. To a standard that I assure you, your Uncle Reg would be more than pleased with.”

“Then why am I so pants at potions class?”

Severus leaned back on his stool, looking at Neville with an appraising eye. “Have you considered the fact that you might be nervous in front of everyone else? The fact that they’re watching you, thinking of you as The Boy Who Lived, scares you?”

While they’d sent Jenny and Marley to magical primary schools, Harry and Neville had gone to muggle school for precisely this reason. It had been a minorly fraught process, but one much better for Neville’s wellbeing. The way grown witches and wizards treated him made Severus seethingly furious. 

“But I have to be better when they’re all watching!” Neville nearly yelled it, which showed exactly how much this was bothering him.

“No, you don’t.” Neville obviously didn’t believe him, skepticism written all over his face. “I’m completely serious. They’re watching you. They’re probably going to be watching you all your life. Well, they can all piss off!” Neville made the shocked face of someone hearing an adult swear for the first time. “Their rudeness and nosiness doesn’t get to decide your life. Understand?” He got a slight nod, and managed to soften his tone. “You should talk to Sirius about this. It wasn’t the same, but in our first year, people were really rude and nosy to him because he was the only member of the Black family to be in Gryffindor.”

“Really?” Sirius was, across the board, the kids’ most idolized uncle. What child wouldn’t find turning into a dog painfully cool? 

“Really. That was how Sirius and I became friends. He got a Howler his very first Christmas at Hogwarts and I burned it. The rest of the tower was just sitting there, listening. You can go ask him about it, if you want. Him and Remus should be here, by now.”

They went back in, after that, but not before Neville hugged him for a long time and had a bit of a cry. Severus didn’t think he’d ever really get used to being trusted like that.

\--

_Mr. Potter, Mr. Snape, Ms. Evans,_

_Please be informed that your child(ren) HARRY POTTER and NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM have been caught in the hallways after hours. A punishment of FIFTY POINTS DEDUCTED PER STUDENT AND ONE DETENTION (TBD) has been given._

_Regards,  
Minerva McGonagall,  
Deputy Headmistress  
Head of Gryffindor House  
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry_

_PS_

_I have to say, after what the three of you got up to in your time at Hogwarts, I don’t know why I expected anything less. Perhaps I was hoping Kingsley would be a good influence._

\--

“You know, James, the one thing that gives me comfort in all this is that at the very least they weren’t using the Invisibility Cloak to get into trouble.”

\--

_Dear Uncle Remus,_

_I saw the most scary thing ever in the Forbidden Forest last night. It was Eating Unicorns. It had a black robe so I didn’t really get a good look at it, but it was pretty scary. Do you know what it could have been?_

_Love to you and Uncle Sirius,_

_Neville_

_\--_

_Dear Neville,_

_No, I don’t. I am sorry that you had to see it. I can assure you that it wasn’t a werewolf (the robe, for one thing, and the phase of the moon, for another) but without more information I can’t know. But to kill a unicorn is a terrible thing, and whatever it was must have been a dark creature indeed. Go to Madam Pomfrey for some chocolate and, if you have any nightmares, feel free to write me about them. These things are always easier when shared._

_Love,_

_R. Lupin_

\--

The hours between when they got Professor McGonagall’s letter telling them to floo over at once because Neville was in the hospital wing, and when Neville woke up, were some of the worst and most torturous of Severus’s life. Not quite like the war, not really, but going over with James – Lily was in court, they’d sent Sirius to fetch her – had been utterly torturous. 

Harry had been awake and uninjured, and, as the three of them had sat in the hospital wing bothering Madam Pomfrey, James had gotten the whole story out of him.

From the beginning of the year, Neville had been nervous of the Defense professor, Quirrell. But no more nervous that Quirrell had been of him, it had seemed to everyone else. In January, there’d been a flying lesson – Harry never went to them, since his admission to the Quidditch team – and afterwards Neville had insisted that his broom was trying to kill him. But the only person they’d seen out of place was Hagrid. 

“And we all knew Hagrid wouldn’t do that. Anyways, it turned out what was wrong with him was that he had a dragon, so we knew he wasn’t the one behind it.”

“Hagrid has a dragon?” James’s tone was deceptively mild. Harry didn’t pick up on the nervousness in his eyes. 

“Not anymore. We gave it to Charlie Weasley. Anyways, since we knew it wasn’t Hagrid, we didn’t know who it could have been, so we thought maybe someone was coming into the castle through one of the secret passages you told us about, but since Neville and I lost the invisibility cloaking giving Norbert – that’s the dragon – to Charlie, we couldn’t look there, and we didn’t know why anyone would break into Hogwarts anyways, and then we figured out who Nicholas Flamel was – Uncle Reg wouldn’t tell us because he thought it was for someone else’s class – but it was on Dumbledore’s Chocolate Frog Card – so anyways we figured out that Fluffy – that’s Hagrid’s three headed dog. We met it when I was going to duel Malfoy because he said Neville’s parents were stupid to get killed and we got lost because Neville forgot the map and so anyways we figure out Fluffy was-”

Either, Severus thought, Harry was going to pass out from not breathing, or he was going to explode, judging by the shade of red his face was turning. James held up a hand, and conjured him a glass of water.

The rest of the story continued in a marginally less frenzied fashion. They’d gone to McGonagall, she’d thought they were telling tales, they’d heard Dumbledore was gone and decided that this was the night. Together, they’d gone back in. Fluffy had already been asleep, so they’d only had to face challenges from the rest of the staff. Devil’s Snare that Neville had dealt with in a hurry. A flying challenge with charmed keys that Harry had caught, a chess game that Ron had won, although he’d been left behind there, and finally, Regulus’s challenge.

“Hermione figured that one out. It looked like a puzzle but it wasn’t, really. There were dozens of potions, and the riddle made it seem like only two were good, but we figured out that really it was that all the potions could be good or bad. If you wanted one, someone else had to give it to you. But that meant they could only go backwards,”

That was a very Regulus sort of puzzle. “And what did you do there?”

“Well, there were three of us, so Hermione and Neville changed potions. She went back to help Ron, and he went forward. I stayed there, and… I don’t know. I just stayed there.”

James pulled him close. Harry seemed to look more like him every single day. “Never, ever, do anything like that again. Your Mum and Papa and I will always come if you and Neville ask. I promise.”

\--

_Regulus,_

_Something keeps swirling around in my mind. That story Harry told me, about the puzzle you left. Dumbledore said Quirrell was able to get through because he was already two people. But how did he know that would work? How did that work, by Merlin’s baggy ballsack? Fuck, which faculty member took James’s Invisibility Cloak when Harry and Neville lost it? Dumbledore’s seen it plenty of times. Was it meant to be a punishment? Were you trying to stop the kids from poking around without telling them off?_

_No, I’m just being paranoid now._

[Letter burnt]

\--

The summer between Harry and Neville’s first and second years was, mercifully, uneventful. Marley, who still had one year left to wait before Hogwarts, was visibly nervous about Ginny leaving her behind, but, really, things could have been much worse.

The end of the summer, from their trip to Diagon Alley to the 1st, was significantly more eventful than the rest. Between Lucius Malfoy and Gilderoy Lockhart (apparently, the new defense professor, Merlin help us), Diagon was utterly occupied by idiots, a fact made worse by Harry almost getting into a fist fight with Malfoy’s son. And then Neville, in a seeming effort to one-up his brother, managed to fail to get onto the carriages with Ron Weasley and the two of them decided it was a brilliant plan to sneak in through the shrieking shack and almost got killed by the Whomping Willow. There wasn’t a howler sent by them after that, but it was a near thing.

\--

_Dear Aunty Lily and Uncle Severus and Uncle James,_

_I don’t think I want to come home for Halloween this year, if that’s okay. Nearly Headless Nick invited us to his deathday party, and I think it would be very not to come. Hannah says so too._

_Love,_

_Neville_

\--

With Neville away at Halloween, they ended up going out in costume like muggles instead. Lily had always wanted to do this with the children, but Neville hadn’t ever wanted to, and they had always been careful to let him set the boundaries around the anniversary of his parents’ deaths. Both of the girls decided it would be funny to go as witches, so Marley went as the Wicked Witch the West, although she was very sad she could not use a real broomstick, and Jenny went as the White Witch, from Narnia, and was very put out every time someone thought she was Glinda. In spite of this, a good time was had by all. Most of all James, who had never seen a real Halloween before, and found every muggle interpretation of real magical creatures endlessly amusing.

Coming home to discover an urgent letter from Neville about finding a dead cat certainly put a damper on affairs. 

\--

When he was at Hogwarts, Severus didn’t think he’d fully understood how little communication with parents there really was. But now that his own children were attending, the letters seemed particularly torturous. It was obvious that Neville felt profoundly isolated by the fact that everyone who had wanted to be his friend had turned on him, a matter made worse by the fact that him and Harry seemed to be fighting with him about something obscure. 

They were reluctant to pull the boys out of school, even as things went from bad to worse, with a student (and, apparently, a ghost), being petrified. But after Christmas, things seemed to have settled down, and with increased security, they’d almost gone back to normal. By Valentine’s day, if not for Remus’s concern when they’d spoken at Christmas, Severus almost would have believed it was only some student’s horrible, horrible idea of a joke. 

\--

_Prongs, Nevermore, Scales,_

_I haven’t much time to send this, but the Board of Governors only just heard; two more students have been petrified. One of them is Harry and Neville’s friend, Hermione. Fudge is convinced Hagrid is responsible – apparently he was expelled for something like this? – Lucius is blaming Dumbledore. I’m only one man, and I can’t stop Dumbledore’s suspension given Lucius’s penchant for blackmail, but I did convince them to install a member of the board – namely, me – as supervision. So I’ll be there to help get to the bottom of it._

_Love,_

_Padfoot_

_\--_

_Dear Neville,_

_No, acromantulas cannot, to the best of my knowledge, cause petrification. If you have any other ideas, please, bring them to Sirius rather than investigating yourself next time._

_Love,_

_R. Lupin_

\--

At a glance, it was hard to say which of the three of them – Harry, Neville, Sirius – looked worst. Harry sat in the corner, cracked glasses on the table beside him, but physically unhurt. Only hours ago, he had been almost fully possessed by Voldemort. Neville was covered in blood, but seemed surprisingly cheerful. Marley’s friend Ginny Weasley was sitting with him, perched on the corner of his bed and chatting away. She’d apparently saved the day by nicking the Marauder’s Map from Harry earlier in the year to conduct a series of pranks. As a result, when Neville, Ron, and Gilderoy Lockhart had vanished from the map in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom, she’d broken away from the rest of the first year students and run to fetch Sirius.

As for Sirius himself he seemed… distraught, perhaps, was the best word. Unusually, he was sitting in human form, staring at his hands, which were not shaking at all. He was still wearing the wrap-around sunglasses he’d conjured when he realized it was a basilisk, which made him look particularly out of place in the Edwardian-looking Hospital wing. 

Sharing silent eye contact, the three of them divided up. Lily went to Harry, sat quietly by his side and held his hand until he was ready to talk. James went to Sirius, and, gently, pulled Sirius against his chest in a silent gesture of gratitude. They’d known each other so well, for so long, that they didn’t really need words for times like this.

And so Severus went to Neville. Even if he seemed mostly alright, that didn’t mean he was. Ginny looked up at him. It was as if her face didn’t really know what expression to make. “Hi… Mr. Snape.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, trying his best not to be too dismissive, or weird in any other way. “Ginny… thank you, very much. But do you think I could get a minute alone with Neville?”

She glanced between them and nodded, vigorously. To Neville, she said, “just because you’re Marley’s dork brother doesn’t mean you’re not brave, yeah?” And then she was gone before he could say a word. 

Severus took her place, and was pleasantly surprised when Neville leant up against him. “When did you go from being ‘The Boy Who Lived’ and her childhood idol to ‘Marley’s dork brother’?”

Neville shrugged. “I think I like this one better.”

Severus put his arm around Neville and, in a more serious tone, said, “do you want to talk about what happened?”

“Not really,” said Neville, so Severus let him curl into his side, watching Lily and Harry in much the same pose on the other side of the room. James and Sirius had pulled apart, Sirius’s glasses finally off and a small smile on his face.

Quietly, Neville said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you something was wrong with Harry. I just thought he was angry at me about something, and he’s never been angry at me like that before. I didn’t think I should complain; he’s your real son.”

And about the rest of it? Severus wanted to ask, why didn’t you tell us about Malfoy’s house elf being the real reason you missed the carriages, or the cursed diary when you found it, or the voice you were hearing, or Hagrid’s warnings about the spiders? But he didn’t ask, because from Neville’s words the reason was achingly clear; he thought they wouldn’t want him if he told them that something was very, very wrong. 

“Neville, look at me.” He did glance up, though he didn’t take his head completely off of Severus’s shoulder. “You must have noticed that Harry isn’t my biological son, haven’t you?” 

It was an obvious fact, really. No child had ever looked so much like their father as Harry did like James. The other two were a bit in the air, really, but with Harry there was no question.

“Yeah, but that’s not really important. He’s still your son, Uncle Sev.” He said the title with some force,

They had always been very clear that Neville didn’t have to call them his parents. To try and leave respectful room for Frank and Alice in his life. Maybe they had been making a horrible mistake.

“You’re our son too. As much and as long as you want to be. If you want to keep calling us ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’, or call us what your brother and sisters do, or call us something else entirely… we can work something out. Just because Frank and Alice were your dad and mum doesn’t mean you aren’t also our son, if you want to be.” And then, just to be a little mean, he added, “you wouldn’t rob Jenny of her favourite brother, would you?”

Neville pressed his face back into Severus’s side and didn’t say anything for a long time. Across from them, Sirius offered a thumbs-up and James mouthed ‘good job!’

\--

That summer was perhaps one of the hardest since before Jenny was born. Harry needed their full attention and support. Neville did too, in ways that were perhaps less obvious. And Marley, of course, felt understandably frustrated that her last summer before going away wasn’t going to be special like her brothers’ had been. But she was a good sport about it, given her age, and they let her go visit the Weasleys before their trip to Egypt, which cheered her some. Jenny went away too, on holiday to Spain with Sirius and Remus. One of Severus’s most essential parenting insight was the every child wanted to feel loved in a unique way. For Marley, getting to be with her friends, and for Jenny, getting to go to Spain where she could see the sort of magical history sites she found fascinating, helped both of them to know that they were seen as special and loved in their own ways. They would have other time with their parents, when they needed them. But for now, Neville and Harry were in more dire straits.

\--

Harry looked up, blearily, when Severus cast lumos in his room.

“Was I screaming again?”

He had been, but that was besides the point. “You weren’t asleep. I thought you might like to get up and have a reset before trying again, like Remus suggested.”

None of them were strangers to nightmares – not even Neville, who still sometimes dreamed of the night has parents died – but Remus was particularly good at giving advice.

Harry dragged himself out of bed with a groan, and went to sit at the kitchen table while Severus made them both a cup of chamomile tea. 

They’d been sitting quietly, nursing their tea, for perhaps a minute or two before Harry asked, “how are you so calm, all the time?”

Severus didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. “I’m not calm all the time.”

“You look like it.”

It was, in some ways, a reflection of how hard Severus had worked to never, ever, be like his father. And now, it seemed, it was coming back to bite him. “I’m not calm. I’m very, very angry. And, if I’m honest, I’m scared. I hate that I haven’t been able to protect you and Neville. I’m scared of losing you. I’m scared of being a bad parent. And as to being angry… there’s nothing wrong with being angry for the right reasons. Growing up, sometimes, just means learning how to use that anger. One of the things that makes me angriest, in the whole world, is the way people talk about werewolves like your uncle. When I was just a bit older than you are now, your mum and I pulled a lot of pranks on a teacher who said horrid things about werewolves. But now that we’re older, Lily writes petitions to the ministry and fights for werewolf rights in court and before the wizengamot, and I do my research because I know I can help people.”

Harry was looking at him with an appraising eye, which hadn’t ever boded well before. “You know mind magics, don’t you?”

It wasn’t one of the worst ideas Harry had ever had. That prize still went to the Philosopher’s Stone incident from his first year. “I’ll teach you occlumency, if you want to learn. Sorting your thoughts can be helpful. A bit like therapy, but with magic.”

“And without a therapist. So not really like therapy.”

“Good point.”

Harry, rather quietly, asked, “can we start tomorrow?”

And so they did.


	2. Years 3-5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This universe’s versions of books 3-5.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory fuck JKR’s transphobic bullshit. I will have none of it.

_Dear All,_

_I want you to hear this from me:_

_Barty Crouch Jr. is no longer in Azkaban. The ministry will be sending dementors to guard Hogwarts, and aurors will be coming by tomorrow to ensure the wards on your house are sufficient. I imagine they should be. They were good enough for the war, at any rate._

_I’m hoping to convince the B of G to reinstate me as an additional supervisor, to oversee the ministry’s presence at Hogwarts until such a time as it is no longer necessary (hopefully, soon). And, of course, Remus will be there teaching defense (the letter from D arrived yesterday confirming it)._

_All my love,_

_Padfoot_

_PS: Jenny, one of your socks got into my luggage, somehow. See enclosed. Love you!_

\--

“I am going to wring Cornelius Fudge’s neck!”

Severus rubbed at his eyes while James grabbed his glasses off the bedside table. “What is it, love?”

Lily sat herself down on the edge of the bed. She was dressed for work already, in formal robes, which meant there was a trial today. After their very, very long summer, Severus had been planning to take a day off to catch up on sleep. It seemed he could have the former, but not the latter.

From the letter in her hand, Lily read, “dear Mum, Dad, Papa, the dementors came on the train. It was awful. We didn’t know what was happening just that they were searching and they came into our carriage and must have sensed something because they just went for Harry and Neville right away, and Neville fainted, and Uncle Remus had to cast a patronus. Did you know his is Padfoot? But then he gave everyone chocolate and we were alright and got to the castle and I am in Hufflepuff. I hope that’s okay, love, Marley.”

“Damn,” said James, “I’ll hold Fudge down while you beat him to death.”

Severus sat up in bed, and pushed his hair fully out of his face. “There is one bright side to this.”

“Forgive me for not seeing one,” Lily snapped, perhaps harsher than she would have if not for the kids being involved.

James saw what Severus had, after a breath,.“Neville fainted. But Harry didn’t.”

Lily looked down at the letter again. “Do you think they’re going to be alright?”

In spite of everything, they had four incredible, brave, kind, good children. “I think so.”

\--

With Remus and Sirius at Hogwarts, keeping three of the children safe, that left Jenny alone as, for the first time in her life, essentially an only child. She was more academic in her pursuits than any of her siblings, and had been since she was about four years old, it seemed to Severus. Neville was firmly in second place, with his passion for herbology, but he liked the practical just as much. There was something of an explorer in him. Jenny was all for history and books and manmade beauty. So where Severus might have taken Neville on a hike to bond, or James and Harry would have gone flying, or Lily and Marley played a bit of muggle football, Jenny and Severus went down to the Godric’s Hollow graveyard, where she could make gravestone rubbings of some of the earliest headstones. It was, in Severus’s mind, something of a morbid hobby. But it was technically educational, he supposed.

“Did you know that the Peverells are supposed to be descended from the Three Brothers?”

“No I didn’t,” said Severus quite truthfully, as he had not grown up on Wizard stories. 

“Here, see.” She pointed at a faded mark. A triangle, a circle, and a line. “The deathly hallows. It’s in the crest.”

“Do you think it’s true, or did they just make it up so people would think they were important? Roman emperors used to do that. Tell people they were related to gods.”

Jenny shrugged, and asked, “do you think they were really wizards? I mean, if they said they were related to gods, could they do magic?”

Ravenclaw, Severus decided. Definitely Ravenclaw. 

\--

_Dear All,_

_I’m starting to regret ever suggesting to the Board that I should be placed here. The Ministry has responded by sending their own representative. Who, you might be wondering, would put me in such a mood? Crouch. Sr. No, I wish I were joking. I think he feels some misplaced guilt about how Barty turned out and is looking to absolve it by sticking his nose in other people’s business. Fortunately, he still has an actual job at the ministry, and only comes every two weeks or so. Dumbledore has been having me watch over him most of the time. I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to have to start drinking on the job! (kidding. I promise. It’s not as bad as all that really and he only drops by just frequently enough that I can almost forget about it between visits)_

_Love,_

_Padfoot_

_PS: Given the situation I thought I might supervise Hogsmede visiting?_

_PPS: Remus has been teaching Neville the patronus charm and thinks we need to tell him more about Barty and what really happened to his parents. Your call, obviously, but I think it is a conversation we need to have. Love, Sirius_

\--

They asked Sirius to bring Neville down to Hogsmede, and Lily and Severus went down while James spent the day with Jenny. And so, while they walked down the road, past Madam Puddifoot’s and out of the village, they explained to him how his parents had been living under a fidelius charm, and how their friend, Bartemius Crouch, had betrayed them to Voldemort. Neville already knew that Voldemort killed his parents, and already knew that he’d had assistance from a deatheater called Barty Crouch. He’d always known that. But it was the first time they’d ever talked about the betrayal, about how he’d been someone they trusted. Neville took it well, but he grew very quiet, and it was not until they were nearly back in the village that he worked up the courage to kneel down and point out a rare flower to them. There, in the middle of kneeling in the dirt talking about root structure, he paused to look up at them. 

“Was he always a spy? Or did he change his mind?”

It was the question Severus knew had haunted all of them, and Regulus in particular, for many years. Lily, gentle, told him, “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

\--

The truth was that, after the last two years, there was nothing coming out of Hogwarts but some minor squabbles and the early struggles of Marley settling in for the first time. When the three came home for Christmas, there was laughter and bright smiles all around. Sirius, Regulus, and Remus all took the chance to drop in for the Holidays. They met with the Weasleys, with the Boneses, and even with Hermione’s family. But Christmas was for the Marauders, as it always had been. This year, for the first time, that included Kingsley’s girlfriend, Vera. She knew that he was a wizard, but this was going to be her first time meeting everyone except for Lily. 

“This could be extremely fraught,” Lily said that night, while they were sitting on the floor wrapping the last of the presents. Her serious attitude was offset by the fact that she had tinsel in her hair. 

“Can’t be more fraught than the time you tried to have Petunia and her husband over,” said James, which was probably true.

Severus asked, “I thought you liked Vera?”

“I do like her, but you know how muggles can be.”

He did. Probably the best out of any of them. “Kingsley wouldn’t bring her if she wasn’t decent.”

“And if she isn’t,” said James, “we can always have Sirius run her off. He told me that the muggleborn students usually think he’s a werewolf.”

They all had to have a good laugh at that.

\--

It turned out their worries were unfounded. Vera was a lovely lady who, about five minutes after meeting them and realizing they three were married, announced that she was bisexual too, and was an activist in the muggle world, and then asked Lily a whole slew of questions about what it had been like to come into the wizarding world where the only difference that really mattered was blood-status. It was evident, by the end of the evening, that Marley had developed a full-blown crush, and Jenny, if not at that stage, certainly seemed awe-struck by the force of nature Kingsley had brought round with him.

It was a joyful night, filled with laughter and joy, and as the kids trickled up to bed and the adults off to their various homes, Regulus stayed. 

With Lily upstairs checking on the children and James at the front door bidding Kingsley and Vera goodbye, Severus joined Regulus in front of the fire, watching the flames dance while he waited for whatever his friend had to say. 

“Dumbledore wants something from me,” Regulus said, rather quietly, “and I’m not sure I know how to give it.”

“Do I get to know what it is?”

The fire crackled, in a way that could have been magical and instead seemed almost foreboding. Regulus shook himself, as if coming out of a trance. “I’ve had too much to drink. Forget I said it.”

It could have been about any number of things: teaching schedules, or creature rights – the ongoing struggle over Hagrid’s Hippogriff Buckbeak, for example – but for Regulus to need to be drunk to mention it, it had to be about Crouch. 

“It isn’t your fault, you know. Don’t let Dumbledore hold it over you.”

Regulus hugged him, just for a second, and it felt uncomfortably like a goodbye. “I won’t. I promise.”

\--

_Scales,_

_I need your opinion on something. Crouch (we assume) tried to poison Dumbledore at breakfast this morning. Whatever it was, it had a distinct smell such that Dumbledore noticed almost immediately and didn’t actually drink it. Do you remember whether Crouch was actually good at potions? This seems strange, doesn’t it? A stupid mistake._

_Love you,_

_Padfoot_

_\--_

_Padfoot,_

_Crouch was a good potioneer. Regulus taught him like I did Lily. But even an idiot could buy a poisonous ingredient that wouldn’t be immediately detectable. The better questions to ask are: why didn’t he, and how did he get the poison into Dumbledore’s drink in the first place?_

_Scales_

\--

For once, the big conflict of the year was solved by more adults than children. Shortly after the unprecedented escape of the Hippogriff Buckbeak, Harry, Neville, Hermione and Ron were walking back to the castle when they met up with Mr. Crouch, the Ministry representative. Crouch asked to speak to Neville in private, but Harry refused to leave, so Crouch walked all four of them to a secluded spot by the greenhouse, and drew his wand. At this point, Hermione sent up sparks, and Neville grabbed a mandrake from the nearest bed and threatened to pull it out, initiating a standoff that lasted until Remus noticed that Neville was late for their defense practice session, and he and Sirius barged in with some help from the currently confiscated map. Regulus, who had come to deliver Remus’s wolfsbane but accidentally forgot it, joined them.

By all accounts, it had been a very concerning duel, which they had easily won except for the fact that Remus shifted partway through and Crouch – Jr., as it resolved – escaped in the commotion.

\--

“It’s a bad thing, I think, that a murderer attempting to kidnap two of our children is by far the least eventful school year they’ve ever had.”

\--

Remus resigned; no matter how much they protested, he insisted that he couldn’t be trusted. Sirius, though, kept his position as external observer of Hogwarts goings-on, and Regulus, of course, was still Potions Master and Head of Slytherin. As for the new defense master, rumour mill generally agreed that it was going to be Mad-Eye Moody, who certainly knew what he was doing. His first suggestion, given last year’s Crouch Debacle, was to require Polyjuice screenings. His second, met by some resistance from the Marauders, but accepted, was to close all the secret tunnels into the castle. In the end, the only one left was under the whomping willow, where they remained confident the tree would take care of any wary intruders 

\--

Remus and Sirius and James all went with the Weasleys to the Quidditch World Cup, and they took Harry, Neville and Marley with them. Jenny stayed behind. It was her last summer at home, and Severus thought she was rather nervous.

\--

They were practicing an OWL-level potion when Neville, not looking up from his cauldron, said, “it was never really over, was it? The war, I mean.”

At the Quidditch World Cup, a dark mark had risen in the sky for the first since Neville was a baby. Severus was fiercely glad that Sirius and Remus had been there with James, and that everyone was alright. But they were all, understandably, very shaken.

“No, I don’t think it was. The war will never really be over as long as there are people who believe in the same cruel things that caused it.” Maybe it wasn’t a good answer, but it was the best answer Severus had.

“Did you ever wonder… if the reason they won’t let go of it is because they’re right, and we’re wrong?”

The truth was, he was probably the only one of the Marauders, aside, perhaps, for Remus, who had ever given the idea serious thought. Even Regulus had only ever been tempted to Voldemort’s cause by his family loyalty, not by any real crisis of conscience.

“I do wonder that. You know that my father was not a very nice man. It was… easy for me to believe that all wizards and witches were better than all muggles. But I also knew muggles like Lily’s parents, who were as good and generous as any wizard. Muggles hold prejudices that Wizards don’t, but we hold more than enough prejudices of our own. Most muggles wouldn’t see any real difference between Remus and the rest of us. But nearly every wizard would. I understand them being afraid of losing what makes the wizarding world special. But Muggleborns have every bit as much a right to be part of that world. Alice and Frank believed that too. Not in keeping the wonderful thing we have as just our own, but releasing it, sharing it, with every magical being.”

“You talk about them like they were really brave.”

Severus checked Neville’s cauldron. It didn’t seem that the distraction had caused any risk, although the potion should have been more turquoise than it was. But, well, provided it wasn’t hazardous, mistakes could be valuable learning experiences.

“They were.”

Neville shifted, awkwardly. “I wasn’t very brave, when I saw the Mark.”

Severus tapped his wand on the workbench, turning up the heat on his own cauldron slightly. “Being brave doesn’t mean being stupid. I know that the things that have happened to you and Harry at Hogwarts have made you feel like you have to save everyone, but you don’t. Not alone, at the very least. There were aurors there, and they dealt with it. I’m glad you did the smart thing, rather than the foolish one.”

Neville didn’t particularly look like he believed him.

\--

_Dear Mum, Dad, Papa,_

_This is… kinda a weird letter to write? I guess I should start with the important thing: I’m in Slytherin. I kinda thought I would be, and here I am. I met the other girls in my dorm already. One half blood, one daughter of a muggleborn and a pureblood ,and then two purebloods. No really interesting families this year, but so far everyone has been pretty nice, if a little weird. They’re only being weird because I’m Neville’s sister, which is… actually kinda nice? I know they don’t think I’m weird, they just think he’s weird._

_Oh also they’re doing the Triwizard tournament, but only for 7th years, which is lame._

_Love you,_

_Jenny_

_\--_

_Dear Mum, Dad, Papa,_

_4th year is going well! It’s really weird to have Jenny in Slytherin though. Marley and Ginny are fighting about Ginny being rude about Slytherins, which is just… not normal. Anyways, I am excited about the Triwizard Tournament. It’s so nice to have something happen that isn’t about me, for once._

_Professor Moody is also weird, but not really bad. His first lesson was about the Unforgivable curses but he offered to let me leave the room even though he wasn’t actually going to cast any of them. I didn’t end up deciding to. I think Harry will be his favourite student, though. The defense Professors always like him. I also feel much better having the Polyjuice detection. Apparently they licensed the design from Gringotts. He went through it first, and then made everyone try it. Nobody was Polyjuiced but it did mess up Fay Dunbar’s hair charms which was pretty funny._

_Oh, also, Ron finally got a pet! Hagrid found a sick rat wandering around and after he nursed it back to health, he gave it to him. Hagrid said the rat seemed smart but I don’t know if I agree. He’s pretty lazy. Sleeps a lot._

_Love you all,_

_Neville_

\--

“And this isn’t even Neville’s handwriting!” James continued, tirade not in the least deterred by Lily having reminded him, for the fourth time, that there was nothing that could be done.

“But that doesn’t even make sense! What would happen if two students had the same name? Or what if someone put in a name that didn’t exist? Or the name of someone who wasn’t a student? Can I put in the name of our Kneazle?”

“James,” Sirius said, quietly. The grimness of his tone seemed to break through James’s fury. “I’ve asked all these questions already. Everyone agrees there’s nothing to be done. Much as all of us would like to remove Neville from competition, we can’t.” He gestured around the room to include Ludo Bagman, Percy Weasley, and the three school heads. 

“ ‘zis ‘ees an outrage,” the headmistress of Beauxbaton cut in, for the third or fourth time. Severus had the disconcerting impression that she and the Durmstrang head were more concerned about Hogwarts having two champions than they were about the danger Neville was in. 

Lily, who had taken a seat while she tried to process what was happening, said, “he doesn’t have to win. He doesn’t even have to try to win. He just has to survive.”

In some ways, it would have been better if it had been Harry. He, at least, had natural talents in defense. Neville’s gifts had always lain elsewhere. But of course, if it had been Harry, all three of them would have been dead, and Marley and Jenny never would have been born.

“And he will,” Dumbledore assured her, placing a wizened hand on her shoulder. “He will.”

\--

Watching Neville put a dragon to sleep with herbology and burning incense was, arguably, one of the prouder moments of Severus’s life, even if he had spent the entire encounter seethingly furious with everyone who had forced his son into that situation.

\--

_Dear Neville,_

_It screams but isn’t a banshee? And you need to be able to decipher a clue from it? Have you tried opening it in different conditions? Perhaps it’s screaming because this hurts._

_Love,_

_R. Lupin_

_\--_

_Dear Uncle Remus,_

_M E R M A I D S_

_Neville_

\--

Neville wasn’t allowed to come home for Christmas that year because of the ball, and the others had decided to stay out of solidarity. But Sirius arranged it so that he and Regulus could bring the children down to Hogsmede to visit, and so they did. They exchanged gifts in the Three Broomsticks, and drank butterbeer that tasted like being fifteen, and the kids talked about their classes and James about his apprenticeship, and Lily about her work, and Severus leaned back and let the chaos and joy of it all wash over him. 

He knew for a fact that Harry hadn’t had a dream about the Basilisk or the Diary in more than three months, which was unprecedented, and he knew that Neville had, with some help from Remus, already figured out part of what the next task would be. He knew that Marley and Ginny had had almost a dozen detentions between them for pranking anyone who tried to pit Neville and the other Hogwarts champion, Cedric Diggory, against each other. He knew from Regulus that Jenny was getting into fights with the other Slytherins, but she had made two friends in her house and one in Ravenclaw. And if there was anything Severus knew about Slytherins, it was that they could be just as deathly loyal as Hufflepuffs when it came down to it. He was worried for Jenny, but it was the house she’d wanted. That mattered, just as much. She would make a place for herself there, one way or the other. 

\--

_Dear Papa and Dad and Mum,_

_The Ball was actually really great. Ginny and I had a lot of fun. (We just went as friends.) Ron was mad, but not nearly as mad as he was that Hermione went with Krum. He and Harry went with the Patil twins. Marley thinks the whole thing is very funny. Also, Marley actually managed to get Cedric to like… sit down with me for a while and we talked and I think everything is going to be better now. Hopefully Ginny and Marley can fight people less._

_I think I know what I’m going to do for the next task, too. Herbology saves the day again!_

_Lots of love,_

_Neville_

\--

“Has anyone seen Jenny this morning? She’d never be late to cheer on Neville.”

“Hermione’s not here either. That’s weird, right?”

\--

If James had been angry after Neville’s name came from the cup, that was nothing compared to his fury after the second task. But everything was alright; Neville came up from the lake second, with Jenny in tow. 

\--  
Neville was second to enter the maze, after Diggory, and thus began their long, miserable wait. The nerves were bitterly painful, and Severus could sense how close all the Marauders were to drawing their wands. All, that was, except for Regulus. He was sitting with the rest of the staff, perched ominously on the edge of his seat. When the first set of sparks went up from the maze, he went with the group to retrieve the first student to withdraw –Delacour – and did not return. 

Lily took Severus’s hand, twining her fingers with his. Even though it was almost summer, there was still a slight chill in the air, an ominous one. Around them, the children and their friends chattered away. 

“Crookshanks did not eat Whiskers, Ron!”

“I don’t know,” Marley said, with a look on her face that was all trouble, “I don’t see any evidence that Crookshanks didn’t eat him. When was the last time anyone saw the rat anyways?”

“There isn’t any!” Ron half-yelled. Harry, sitting beside him, winced. 

“Maybe you’re just not a very good pet owner,” Ginny said, with the same troublesome expression as Marley. 

Harry, long-suffering, planted his forehead on the wooden railing with a thud. 

A second trail of sparks shot into the sky, and, after a few moments, a bewildered-looking Krum was deposited on the field.

“We should have just told him to withdraw the second he got into the maze,” Remus whispered, having leaned in between Severus and Lily. She nodded once, in agreement.

Severus understood that argument, but he also understood why Neville hadn’t chosen to do it. This entire tournament had been something that he’d succeeded at almost entirely on his own merit. Without a unique threat from Voldemort or any more help than was required to make going up against seventh-years a fair fight. With Harry, who was brilliant at defense and increasingly excellent at mental magics, and Hermione, who was good at everything, Neville’s own skill was too-often left forgotten. This was an opportunity to prove himself to everyone.

The minutes ran together. It was a Hogwarts victory, that much was certain, but who? And how?

“Look!” Jenny said, and swung down to grab something. “This is Whiskers, isn’t it, Ron? He must have been hiding here. I wonder how he got out of the castle?”

There was the distinctive pop of a portkey arriving, and everyone rose to their feet, the crowd swelling, 

And then the screaming. The horrible, horrible screaming. Severus was running before he knew what was happening, pulling Neville away from the lifeless body of Cedric Diggory. 

Dumbledore took charge of the situation, and, in the chaos of the field, he could hear the old wizard saying, “Mr. Weasley, Miss Granger, why don’t you and your friends take Neville to wait in my office?”

Amos Diggory was crying, and Severus’s heart broke for him. Sirius and Remus had run off to help Minerva take charge of the students, get them away from the body. Marley was crying, heaving, angry sobs into James’s arms. Regulus was nowhere to be found.

Lily grabbed Severus’s shoulder. “I’ve got Jenny. Can you go after Neville and Harry?”

The boys and their friends had already fled the premises on Dumbledore’s orders. Severus pushed through the crowd after them only to find his path filled by the singularly loathsome person and voice of Rita Skeeter. 

“Mr. Snape! How do you respond to the suggestion that your ward Neville Longbottom killed Mr. Cedric Diggory in the course of the Triwizard tournament?”

Where the hell had she gotten that from? “If you print a word of that, I will sue you for libel so fast it makes your ears ring. And he’s my son, not my ward.”

“And what do you say to the rumours that Mr. Longbottom was nearly considered a squib?”

“They sound like schoolroom bullying to me.”

“And the sorting of Miss Jennifer Potter into Slytherin–”

Jenny, as if on cue, shoved herself through the crowd, Lily on her heels, and burst into tears, clinging to Skeeter like a drowning girl. Severus slid past the reporter, and turned back in time to catch Jenny’s wink. The older children, it seemed, had taught her well.

Free from the crowd, Severus made his way back to the castle, along paths he had walked many times before. He led himself through the empty hallways of Hogwarts and came upon Regulus. 

To whatever emotions he saw on Severus’s face, he said, “is Neville alright?”

“He is, but Cedric is dead. The boys are waiting in Dumbledore’s office with Ron and Hermione.”

And so Regulus accompanied him up to the Headmaster’s Office, but, just as they began to ascend the stairs, he put his finger to Severus’s lips. He obviously heard something that Severus could not, and, gently, they ascended the stairs. 

On the other side of the door, someone was saying, “and what did he look like, Longbottom? Was he… glorious?”

That was not the voice of any of the children. Wands raised, they burst through the door, and Severus was so shocked he almost forgot to cast his spell. “Peter Pettigrew?”

Pettigrew, at least, seemed gratifyingly shocked to see him. Neville, who wasn’t, grabbed a bowl of sweets off of Dumbledore’s desk and threw them at Pettigrew. He’d taken the childrens’ wands, it seemed. 

Regulus, recovering from his shock first, yelled, “stupefy!” which Severus matched quickly with a wordless ‘expelliarmus!’ Pettigrew blocked Regulus’s spell, but not Severus’s. As Pettigrew’s handful of wands went flying, Harry, with seeker’s reflexes, caught his own out of the air and pointed it at Pettigrew. Severus’s long-ago classmate raised his hands in surrender.

To Neville, who was picking his wand up off the ground, Severus said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“We’re fine. You got here before anything really bad could happen.”

Ron shook his head. “Weak argument, mate.” He accepted his wand when Neville handed it to him with a grateful nod. 

Hermione, who was always best about remembering to report to authority, told Regulus, “he was an animagus. Disguised as Ron’s rat. He was supposed to be in Azkaban but they didn’t know he was an animagus because he learned at Durmstrang, so he escaped and stowed away.”

Two Azkaban breakouts in as many years. Lily and Kingsley had always said the prison was cruel, but Severus hadn’t realized it was also deeply ineffective. 

“Is anyone hurt?” Regulus asked. Everyone shook their heads no except for Neville, who held out his bleeding arm, and Severus went to him and began the healing spells. 

It was there, in that tableau, that Neville finally found the strength to say aloud, “Voldemort is back.”

\--

That summer, there was an awful calm that seemed to settle over the world that deluded people into believing all was well. Most ignored Neville’s dire warning, taking the peace they saw as evidence that all would be well. Severus wished he could be so calm. Instead, he spent that summer brewing up a storm with Regulus, preparing for the war to come. James dug a secret cellar in the back garden and they put much of the potions store there, along with a variety of other emergency and secondary defenses. They bribed and begged and pleaded with Marley and Jenny to agree to hide there, if worst came to worst and eventually they complied. 

There was no such luck to be had with Harry and Neville. Neville pointed out, rather coolly, that since Voldemort was trying to kill him, not them, being with Jenny and Marley only put them in danger. Harry, it seemed, was being incorrigible out of a misguided drive towards solidarity. 

Compounding all this, Dumbledore seemed intent on being maddening this summer. While the rest of the marauders were reconvening the order of the Phoenix, and even the Weasleys had vanished in pursuit of this task, he chose to keep them infuriatingly in the dark. All of the children wilted without access to their friends. Jenny wrote to a couple of her Slytherin friends like clockwork and counted the days until she was going back to school dutifully on a calendar on her wall. Marley, rather bitterly, seemed to be keeping a close eye on the count. 

Harry and Neville, unlike their sisters, had muggle friends who there were no barriers to seeing. From the schools they had attended so that Neville wouldn’t be treated like some kind of mystic savior – or, if the current trend were to continue, like a pariah. Those of their muggle friends they still got on with treated them like everyone else, and Severus thought the break was good for them. 

At least, he thought this until they got home from playing football half-carrying each other, stumbling and looking ill.

“Fucking dementors,” Neville said, with feeling.

\--

_The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix are Located at Number 12 Grimmauld Place._

_Welcome,_

_RAB_

\--

It was always a delight, to see Lily on her feet and arguing before the Wizengamot. There was just a little grey in her hair, now, but as much fire in her eyes as they day they met and Severus loved her not a bit less. Seeing James leaning in and watching, just as enraptured, Severus knew he felt the same. 

\--

“Great news, Harry, Neville! Hogwarts is going to take you off our hands again. It’s a bit of a toss up whether they’ll decide to execute you when you get there but they aren’t snapping your wands yet!”

“Shut up, Dad!”

\--

The children had been back at school for six weeks when Regulus came tumbling into Headquarters with a deadly expression on his face. He jabbed a finger at Dumbledore. “I want to talk to you. Everyone else out.”

Regulus shouted very rarely, but when he did it was truly spectacular. Whatever this blow-up was over, Dumbledore seemed to say not a word until it was done. Halfway through, Lily waved a wand to dispel most of her anti-eavesdropping spells and James produced an extendable ear he’d confiscated from the twins. The three of them and Remus all leaned in close to listen.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Ministry, or the Minister, or the damn plan. Fuck the ‘Dark Lord’ and fuck you and fuck your fucking plan. She is hurting our students. My students. Pomona’s students.”

“Two very particular students of yours and Pomona’s, it would seem.”

“Yes, the usual fucking suspects! Of course! Be grateful I caught mine trying to hide hers before it could get infected! Now are you going to stand up to her, or am I going to have to get Sirius to do it?”

\--

_Dear Cousin Cissy,_

_How are you my dear? I hope you and Lucius are well. For all our differences, I think I have a proposition that Lucius might be interested in joining me in. I, for one, find this ministry interference in Hogwarts rather… unattractive. For one thing, their insistence that they have direct oversight over the school is a direct violation of the board’s authority. But, perhaps more pressingly, I suspect their chosen professor is rather blatantly disrespectful of her betters. She has been using a blood quill on the children of Pureblood houses, which is very unattractive. I, for one, think the fact that both Dumbledore and the Ministry let this sort of behavior slip by unnoticed is a tremendous coup for the board. Why, this very reason ought to make a good case that there should be a higher standard for future Hogwarts hires, one that I feel we should be able to enforce the find staff of… better quality._

_Warmest regards,  
Your Cousin,   
Sirius, Lord Black._

\--

After the exposé was released in the Daily Prophet, and Sirius was made Hogwarts’s official DADA professor – much to Minerva’s chagrin – Lily, James and Severus left the order for a while. They were all too seethingly angry at Dumbledore for refusing to act. 

It was not a terrible surprise when Severus heard the chime a the laboratory door and looked up to see Albus Dumbledore’s glittering purple robes through the glass.

The potion Severus had been designing, to boost resistance to the Imperius Curse, had been displeasing him, so he vanished it with a flick of his wand and opened the door with another. He didn’t expect Lily and James would have been willing to talk to him, but Severus had always had a uniquely close relationship with the headmaster. 

“I’m sure you can understand why we’re upset.”

Dumbledore nodded, and took a seat in the visitor’s chair beside the door. “Yes, I believe I can.”

“Our children have been hurt so many times, trying to go safely to school. The first year incident, I forgive you for that; they should have kept out of it, but Harry’s second year? Or everyone treating Neville like he was mad even though to be a Parsletongue is an ancient and noble gift? Or Crouch? He was the wrong person! And even all Mad-Eye’s paranoia couldn’t keep my sons from having to share a room with a man who was convicted of torturing their uncles.”

Dumbledore sat there, and took the abuse Severus had to lob at him. “Yes,” he said, “we should have been able to prevent all of those things?”

“Then why couldn’t you?” Severus demanded, hands working quickly as he cleaned his workbench of stains and residue. He always cleaned potions’ ingredients by hand when he could, to avoid any negative magical interaction.

Dumbledore’s eyes watched Severus closely through his half-moon glasses. “A combination of ignorance and arrogance, I think. I did not imagine that an unregistered animagus could have snuck onto my campus, nor that Bartemius Crouch was, in fact, the son.” It was, in fact, two unregistered animagi, if Hermione was to be believed. Apparently, she had spent part of her summer blackmailing the reporter Rita Skeeter over this very issue. This was why her voice had been conspicuously absent from the collection of reporters trying to discredit Neville in the paper.

“But I was also arrogant. I believed that I could keep the children safe, and I could not and did not. And can not. This war is coming, whether I want it or not.”

“And what are you going to do to ensure my children see the end of it?”

Dumbledore had always seemed old to Severus. When he was a boy, unimaginably so. But in that moment, he seemed truly frail. “All I can do, Severus. See that they are as well-trained as they can be. I think Neville has been neglected on that front of far too long. Over Christmas break, you should begin to train him, as you have Harry, in the art of Occlumency.”

“I can do that.”

\--

_Dear Dad,_

_I found a room in Hogwarts that I bet you don’t know about! (It isn’t on the map!) It’s a different room every time you go there. I haven’t figured out how many options there are yet. It’s pretty cool._

_Love,_

_Marls_

\--

Christmas, it proved, wasn’t soon enough to save Neville, or to save Arthur Weasley, who spent the holiday in St. Mungo’s. Severus and Regulus too dropped everything and did everything they could to help him.

When Arthur was well enough to come home, Severus cracked his knuckles and began to teach Neville Occlumency. This, predictably, was a disaster. 

Where Harry had been enthusiastic to learn, Neville proved resistant. He became sullen and recalcitrant. So much so that Severus began to wonder if it was even his son, who was standing in front of him. This, of course, only made the situation worse. Neville’s occlumency slowly improved, but his anger at all of his parents, Severus most of all, for keeping him in the dark about so many things, was sharp and powerful. 

In April, the Ministry re-asserted influence over the Hogwarts in the wake of a mass-breakout from Azkaban. Sirius kept his job, but the school was placed under a form of lockdown and Lucius Malfoy took on Sirius’s former position as the board’s representative, instituting ban after ban on all forms of outside communication. Severus’s ability to come in and teach Neville was lost and the lessons fobbed off on Sirius, who was woefully unprepared.

In May, Neville announced plans to spend summer with his grandmother instead of with them. The only thing they could do was agree, but Severus caught James and Lily watching him, wondering what he’d done wrong to drive their son away.

\--

_HOGWARTS DEFENSE ASSOCIATION  
First Meeting._

_Founders: H. Potter & C. Chang  
President: H. Potter  
Vice-President: G. M. Weasley   
Events Coordinator: H. Granger  
Secretary: H. Granger  
Treasurer: H. Granger  
Interhouse Outreach Coordinators: C. Chang & M. Potter  
Academic Supervisor: Prof. S. Black_

\--

When the children were out of the house, Severus, Lily and James had been practicing dueling with each other since the end of Harry and Neville’s first year. So, when Regulus’s patronus – a ghostly imitation of his animagus form – leapt atop Severus’s lab bench and announced, “the children have gone to the ministry, hurry,” he was up in a flash, vanishing his in-progress potion and summoning his carrying-case of completed potions with two decisive flicks of his wand. Then he was through the fireplace and in the lobby of the ministry, watching as James stumbled out of the fireplace on his left, Augusta Longbottom on his right, and Kingsley and Lily right across from him.

They ran down towards the department of mystery, where all of them had stood guard many times, wands grasped tightly in their hands and determination coursing through them, perfect and serene.

\--

“Granny!”

“Augusta!”

\--

After Dumbledore came, and Voldemort fled, they ended up back at Hogwarts. Severus, Lily, Dumbledore, and Neville, all sitting in the Headmaster’s Office. James had stayed behind with Sirius and Remus, to look after Harry, Marley and their friends. Jenny, blessedly, had remained at Hogwarts.

Neville was sitting on the floor when they arrived, both hands wrapped around his wand and head between his knees. He made to stand up at their arrival, but Lily sat on the floor beside him in a gesture of silent protest, and soon they were all sitting on the floor, even Dumbledore, whose robes flowed out around him like a ballgown.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about the prophecy? That I’m like… this, because of fate, or destiny.”

Severus had no good answer for him. Perhaps Lily didn’t either, for she said nothing, and Neville flinched away from her touch. Dumbledore said, “but you aren’t, are you, Mr. Longbottom? You are, as you say, ‘like this’, because Voldemort chose you. The prophecy did not mention Neville Longbottom by name.”

Gently, Severus prompted, “You will have heard us talk about going into hiding, just before the end of the war.”

Neville’s head snapped up. “Harry.” They all nodded, and Neville went back to staring at his shoes. “He wouldn’t have done something that stupid.”

“I think Harry knows better than anyone what it is to make bad choices when you aren’t fully in possession of yourself.”

To Dumbledore, he asked, “Is that why I survived? When he tried to kill me as a baby? Because of fate?”

It was Lily who answered, surprising Severus even more than she had surprised Neville. “No. It was because your father died for you. He was a pureblood, old family, and Voldemort must have offered him a chance to live if he stood aside. I don’t think the magic would have worked otherwise. He refused, and his love protected you then. It still protects you. Augusta blood-adopted me, so you could stay with us, so you would be safe even if something ever happened to her.”

No wonder Dumbledore had backed off, all those years ago, from his insistence that Neville be taken to live with Augusta. Lily had pacified him. 

But magic had a cost. There was a reason why magical adoptions were rare. “You gave up Petunia.”

Lily didn’t say anything to that. If her family hadn’t been muggles, they would have known that she had rejected them. This sort of ritual was a taboo for a reason.

Neville asked, “why doesn’t anyone tell me anything? I mean, I know he was in my head this year. I get it. But before now? Why didn’t I know any of this? Is there anything else I still don’t know?”

Dumbledore said, “there is a great deal none of us know, Mr. Longbottom. To this day, I do not know how word of the prophecy came to Voldemort’s ears, although Mr. Pettigrew’s animagus status did indicate one potential option. But what I do know… next year, I will begin to teach you what I can. I suspect that over the summer, your parents will do the same, if you are willing to learn from any of us,”

\--

Severus came upon Lily and Neville, sitting alone together in the back garden. There wasn’t much to say, really. But Lily slid down the bench to make room, and Severus knew that he was forgiven, for any part he had played in Neville’s brief estrangement. He pressed their knees together, to let her know that she was forgiven for the lie of omission she had told about her blood oath. 

Neville said, into the thick summer air, “she shouldn’t have died for me. She wasn’t… I wasn’t anything like the grandson she wanted.”

“You were the grandson she had,” said Lily, “she knew that.”

In truth, Augusta had always been hard on Neville. Unreasonably so. She had wanted him to be Frank, had even offered him Frank’s wand, which sat in a box somewhere in Neville’s room. But he wasn’t. In truth, they were not much alike. Neville wasn’t even much like any of the three of them. He was, fully and entirely, his own. All the children were, even if Harry’s looks and Marley’s laughter and Jenny’s fierce sense of right and wrong could sometimes be deceiving in that regard.

“Is this what the war is going to be like? Are people going to die for me?”

Lily shook her head. Severus said, “I don’t know. Maybe they will. Or maybe they’ll die for the ideal they see you as a symbol of. The Boy Who Lived.”

“But that isn’t even really me!”

“I know,” said Lily, and she took his hand, even though he no doubt thought himself too old for such childhood comforts as holding his mother’s hand. 

After a while, Neville said, “I think I’m ready to learn, now. Whatever it is that you have to teach me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, this fic may have gotten a little away from me so I pushed the chapter count up one. I’ll post that third chapter in two weeks!


	3. Years 6 and 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Voldemort revealed to be alive, the Wizarding War resumes in earnest. If only Severus could keep it from touching his children (and worse, keep them from reaching out to fight in it).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: character death(s) canonical and non-canonical. Canon-typical violence. Grief/mourning.

_Dear Papa,_

_Our new potions master is named ‘Horace Slughorn’, and he says he came back because Regulus personally asked him to._

_I won felix felicis off of him in our first class by using some of the tips you gave me. Hermione made me promise to share all your notes going forward. Have you ever thought about writing a textbook?_

_I’ll send a longer letter tomorrow but I thought you would want to know right away._

_Love,_

_Neville._

\--

Nothing could have made Severus more seethingly furious than to know that Horace Slughorn had returned to teach potions. In fact, it made him so angry that he demanded Dumbledore allow him to cart himself over to Hogwarts twice a week to teach a series of mixed-age voluntary potions classes. As the stores in Diagon were boarded-up one by one, the vibrant life of the castle was a pleasant change. He didn’t grade, but he did do more or less everything else one would expect from a professor, with pleasure. Harry, Neville and Ron were all in his mixed 6-7 class, while in the 4-5 mix he had acquired Marley, Ginny, and their new friend Luna. Jenny, who was top of her year, did not take a spot in the 2-3 class. 

As Severus spent his time offering what he could to the students and watching the population of Diagon Alley drain away, Regulus was distant and odd. He’d taken Sirius’s position as defense professor, a truly baffling hiring choice on Dumbledore’s part. Part of the oddness, they all knew, was about Barty Crouch. Since his escape from Azkaban, Regulus had never been quite the same. Now that the war was resuming in earnest, the guilt and grief had become more visceral than ever.

The rest of the Marauders had shifted their positions as well. After Lucius Malfoy’s arrest – he’d left Hogwarts grounds shortly after the children to join Voldemort at the ministry – the Hogwarts Board of Governors had not sent another representative back to the school, and Sirius had, save for his participation in the Wizengamot, became a full-time member of the Order of the Phoenix, along with Remus and James. They worked alongside the aurors, for the most part, plotting defenses, responding to death eater action against muggleborns and their families. 

Where Severus found a flash of hope and life in Hogwarts, James, Sirius and Remus found it elsewhere. It was revealed that after his fourth year, Neville had given his tournament prize money to Fred and George Weasley to start their prank shop. Even as adults, the Marauders found great joy in helping their younger counterparts in developing their ideas. Even Severus contributed a little, and it was a blessed relief to laugh with his friends and his husband as he thought up mixtures of magical face-paints and nail polishes and hair dyes.

For Lily and Kingsley, there was no such relief; the encroaching war bought encroaching doom. The knowledge that war would soon consume all of them brought much of the justice system, particularly the petty charges she and Kingsley usually dealt with, to a screeching halt. It wasn’t much of a surprise when, in the wake of the murder of Amelia Bones, Kingsley left private practice to work with Mad-Eye Moody running the DMLE. As for Lily, well, she did what she could. There was still plenty of magical law that needed doing, tenants with landlords and divorces that were happening and custody to be fought for. Bad laws that needed to be challenged. But she was fighting a ceaseless, losing battle, and they all knew it. In December, just before Christmas, she closed her office for the last time and moved to join Kingsley’s new Internal Affairs Taskforce. 

\--

That year, they celebrated Christmas at the Burrow, and they had a Christmas wedding too. It wasn’t a lawful affair; they recognized that, if things went badly in the war, being married might endanger everyone involved. But that didn’t stop them from wanting their feelings recognized. So, Vera and Kingsley said their vows in Mrs. Weasley’s back garden, in the snow, with Lily as their un-official officiant. They didn’t really have wedding parties, as such, or much of a party at all. They promised to do it again, properly and with Vera’s friends present, when the war was over. Mrs. Weasley spent the entire wedding giving her older children – just Bill and Charlie, that was, now – pointed looks. Charlie gleefully ignored them, but Bill passed them on in the form of staring wistfully at Fleur Delacour.

Their reception was really just the Christmas dinner, and everything went well until the minister arrived, with Percy Weasley in tow, to wreak havoc. While James went to loom over Neville’s shoulder at the Minister, Severus found himself sitting with Marley alone near the top of the long, precarious staircase. 

It was an opportunity to ask the question he’d been wondering all afternoon. “Do you know why Hermione didn’t come for Christmas?” 

Severus had always gotten the distinct impression that she wasn’t especially close with her family, although he’d been careful to keep a watch for any signs of abuse. She certainly spent an odd amount of time with both the Weasleys and the Potters. In fact, last Christmas she’d dropped everything to return to them after she’d heard about Arthur’s injuries. 

Marley chuckled, in the back of her throat, and shook her head a little. “Her and Ron have been fighting. By which I mean: he’s dating someone to spite her, and it’s working.”

Severus did not miss being sixteen. Not at all. “I’m glad none of you ever have this sort of drama.”

Marley laughed so hard she almost tumbled down the stairs before explaining the Harry-Cho debacle that happened over the last two years, including a first date that had culminated in crying about trauma and co-founding the Defense Association. There had not been a second date, but they had worked hard on the club together.

“He left that part out when he told us about founding the club.”

“Absolutely typical.”

\--  
_  
HOGWARTS DEFENCE ASSOCIATION PLANNING MEETING  
JANUARY 14, 1997_

_PRESENT:  
President: H. Potter  
Vice-President: G. M. Weasley  
Events Coordinator: M. Potter  
Secretary: H. Granger  
Treasurer: H. Granger  
Interhouse Outreach Coordinators: S. Bones, L. Lovegood & J. S. Potter  
Academic Supervisor: Prof. R. Black_

_\--_

_Dear Papa,_

_When you warned me about Horace Slughorn, I didn’t think you meant he might poison my friends! I’m just glad you always drilled potions safety into our heads the way you did. I had a bezoar in my hand almost immediately._

_It is weird that he had a bottle of poisoned wine, isn’t it? Who would try and poison Slughorn?_

_Neville is acting weird. Either he just feels guilty about the way he accidentally contributed to Ron’s poisoning by leaving those chocolates on his windowsill, or he knows something we don’t. Given these lessons with Dumbledore… I don’t know, he seems different. I’ve talked to Jenny and Marley and we’re all going to try and keep an eye on it, but I just wanted to let you know._

_Love,_

_Harry_

_\--_

_Dear Mum, Dad, Papa,_

_Harry is out of the hospital wing now. I never thought I would feel so bad crushing him in a Quidditch game, but honestly between that asshole McLaggen, and having to quit because of the dementors third-year, and the bone-vanishing incident in Second Year, I’m starting to think he might have some kind of obscure Quidditch-related curse. Maybe Bill Weasley would take a look at it for us?_

_Love,_

_Marls_

_\--_

Jenny came to him while Severus was packing up from his last lesson of the day, wearing a distinctly odd expression. Severus shut the door and cast some of his most tried and true anti-eavesdropping spells. He knew from personal experience exactly what students could be like. 

Jenny perched herself on Severus’s desk and watched him pack up his potions kit. 

“I just had a really strange interaction with Draco Malfoy.” His gaze snapped up and she shook her head. “Not dangerous weird. He just cried a lot.”

Aside from the time Harry and Draco had almost gotten into a fight when Lucius had left the diary in Harry’s school supplies, Severus didn’t think he’d ever actually met Draco Malfoy. He hadn’t deigned to join Severus’s potions lessons, certainly.

“What happened?”

“He has the dark mark.” She said it bluntly. Of course, as a Slytherin, it was a reality of her life that many of the people she was meant to be close with did. “Harry’s been trying to stalk him all year. Marley and I have been… cooperating, I guess. Anyways, I followed him and he was crying and I think he was going to try and fight whoever it was until he saw it was me. Then he asked me what it was like not to be the person my parents wanted me to be.”

“Excuse me?” Severus was going to kill that young deatheater.

“I think he meant a Slytherin. It’s not like he knows me at all, really, other than that he remembers I’m Neville and Harry’s sister. Anyways, I told him there wasn’t one person my parents wanted me to be. And he said that was strange, for a pureblood, and I said that it shouldn’t be, and he left, and that was it. But I just… I think about the stories Uncle Sirius told us, about his parents, and I wonder if Harry’s reading the situation wrong. Maybe Malfoy’s a little deatheater twerp because he doesn’t have anything else to be.”

Severus had little and less compassion for a boy who could very well have been complicit in getting Harry possessed by Voldemort, but Jenny searched for good in her fellow Slytherins where she could find it. “What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “Tell Harry to back off, probably. We’ve been indulging him for too long as it is. And tell Uncle Reg about what’s going on. He’s our head of house, and he’s Draco’s cousin. He might be able to help.”

A sensible plan. Better than anything Harry or Marley had ever come up with when left to their own devices. “Good idea, Jenny. And if it ever does come down to it, remember that you don’t owe Malfoy anything, but any help you want to offer him… we have your back.”

Jenny gave him a brief but fierce hug, and went back to her classmates and her life.

\--

_Dear Mum, Dad, Papa,_

_Ron and Hermione are dating now. They thought we wouldn’t notice but we did. Harry… I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on with Harry. He still hasn’t really left off Malfoy, but also him and Ginny were snogging at the victory party for the Quidditch Cup. Neville isn’t dating anyone, which I think demonstrates good taste. I don’t think I would stoop to dating any of these weirdos._

_Love,_

_Marls_

\--

At first, when the patronus comes bounding through the dining room wall, Severus thought James had developed the most unnecessary over-use of magic to ask him to do the dishes. Instead, it was Harry’s voice that came from the stag, and he was fiercely glad Remus had taken the opportunity to teach him that trick over Christmas. 

“Neville and Dumbledore have left the building. The map has deatheaters appearing out of the Room of Requirement.”

Severus’s ability to get into Hogwarts via floo powder operated because the floo network would be manually opened by someone else, usually Regulus, on the other side. Tossing down a fistful, he called, “Regulus Black’s Office!” but nothing happened. Lily, who must have heard Harry’s words from her home-office, cleared her throat lightly. “The fastest way in will be to apparate to the gates. You can get us in with your professorial credentials.”

The order guard on the gates, whoever it had been, seemed to have abandoned their post. Fortunately, Severus was able to pass through the magic anyways, and let Lily and James through as well. From there, Lily shifted into her animagus form and launched herself up towards the castle, towards where the dark mark hung overhead. James too could move faster in his animagus form, and he let Severus shift to climb upon his back as he had when they were children themselves. 

They came upon Marley in the entryway, standing together with Susan Bones. Both girls had their wands drawn, and looked scared. Marley relaxed when she recognized her fathers, and laid a hand on Susan’s wrist to stop her from pointing her wand at them. 

“Report,” James said after they shifted back, without much of his usual humour. 

Marley, equally grim, explained, “Harry’s stalking of Malfoy finally payed off. Turns out he figured out some sort of plot to sneak deatheaters into the castle. He had a feeling that today while Neville and Dumbledore were gone was going to be bad, so we called up the DA to do patrols.”

Brave. But very, very stupid.

“And the rest of the student body?”

“Safe in their common rooms, hopefully.”

James was halfway through asking, “and you aren’t because?” When the doors burst open to reveal Bellatrix and Rudolphus Lestrange, and then there was a great amount of duelling and not a lot of talking before Regulus arrived. 

It was such a plain relief to see him, but far less of a relief when he said to the Lestranges, “we have to go, now,” and fired off a jinx that just narrowly missed Marley as she ducked.

And then came Lily, in hot pursuit, wand drawn and face wet with tears, and Regulus and the Lestranges ran, fleeing out towards the forest, and Lily chased them all the way. Severus would have joined her, but instead, gritting his teeth, he took Marley and Susan back to their common room and stayed outside it, protecting the children, until Kingsley came to tell him the battle was over. They walked to the infirmary together.

Everyone seemed to be there. Lily was nursing a cut on her arm from a spell Severus himself had invented. James had his wand out already, murmuring the counter-curse over it, but still Severus hated the pain he had caused her. Lily, seeing him, raised her other hand to beckon him closer, and Severus walked past Bill Weasley, lying in bed surrounded by his family and fiancée, and, for some reason, Remus, past Tonks and Kingsley, who began arguing in hushed tones while she held a bloody cloth to her head, past Sirius, curled on the ground as Padfoot, and up to his wife and husband. 

He almost tripped over Neville, who was sitting on the ground against Lily’s bed with his head in his hands.

“What happened?” He meant to ask Lily, but it was Neville who answered, 

“Dumbledore took me out of the castle… to show me something, something about how to defeat Voldemort. But when we came back, we saw the dark mark over the tower. We flew back, but I was slow, and he was weak, and when we arrived, Regulus and Malfoy were waiting for us. Malfoy disarmed him, and Regulus cast Petrificus Totalus on me, and I couldn’t move, and I could hear them talking about how Malfoy had been tasked with killing Dumbledore, and Dumbledore asked him if it was because his father is in Azkaban, and asked why he hadn’t accepted Jenny’s offer to protect him, and Regulus said it was taking too long and he–”

Neville cut himself off, choking on his words, and from across the room, Severus could hear Molly, Fleur and Remus all yelling about something.

Lily said, “that was when I arrived on the tower. I saw him kill Dumbledore, and I changed back. Malfoy wasn’t expecting it so I stunned him and Regulus ran. That was when we ran into you.”

“And Malfoy?”

Neville said, “Mum cast the counter on me, so I got up around when he did and we fought down to the Room of Requirement. That was how he got them all into the castle. He ran back inside and escaped.”

James, finished with Lily’s arm, knelt down to put his arm around Neville. Lily leaned over and kissed Severus. It was a quiet reassurance that they were both alive. 

\--

_Regulus Arcturus Black,_

_What I don’t understand is why you did it. When did you join their side? You were loyal during the first war, weren’t you? You must have been, to have been our secret keeper. Only, you brought Barty in, didn’t you? Did you sacrifice Frank and Alice to him? Did you do it on purpose?_

_Dumbledore told me once that he had, a very long time ago, had the misfortune to fall in love with the wrong person. I don’t believe he ever told anyone else that. But that day, just before we went and joined the war, he chose to tell me. I don’t know why he did that. I hate more than anything in the world that he died feeling betrayed, like he’d trusted the wrong person again. He wasn’t always a good person. Often, he was foolish. But he trusted you implicitly. You knew he did._

_Did you tell Quirrell how to get the Philosopher’s stone, how to pass your riddle? Did you take the cloak and watch my children walk into his presence, where they could have been killed? Did you know that Harry was being possessed? Did you know about Crouch? Did you ‘forget’ Remus’s wolfsbane on purpose? Did you know about Pettigrew? Where did you go during the Triwizard Tournament? Were you standing in robes in that cemetery while they tortured my son? Did you tell Voldemort about the prophecy? Did you help him plant the compulsion to go to the ministry in Neville’s mind?_

_Or did you just see the opportunity when Jenny told you about Draco being a deatheater, and choose to take it?_

_Rot in hell, you treacherous bastard. May I live to piss on your grave,_

_Severus Snape_

_P.S. I hope you know that you broke Sirius’s heart, too._

\--

After Dumbledore’s funeral, Severus and Sirius walked around the grounds, until they were standing just out of reach of the whomping willow. In all that time, neither of them said much, but when they stood and watched the tree extend feelers towards them, just narrowly missing each time, there was so much to be said. 

“You did love him,” Sirius said, “like I did.”

He loved all the Marauders, but Regulus was special. Regulus had been his best man, while Sirius had been James’s, and Remus had been Lily’s. Severus was the one who had found Regulus on the day he went missing, who had brought him to stay with Lily’s parents. 

It was a good thing they were dead. That they didn’t have to know that their kindness had been repaid with hatred and bigotry. 

“Yes.”

They turned away from the willow. On the other side of the lake, he could see Neville walking with Harry, Hermione, and Ron. He was holding something metal in his hand, the light reflecting off it as it twisted in his fingers.

“He wasn’t always like this, was he? Something changed.”

“He was never the same after Barty betrayed us. You know that as well as anyone.”

It was true, but in those first few years, there’d never been any doubt, certainly not of his love for Sirius. “He loved you. I know he did.”

“Didn’t matter in the end, did it.”

No, in the end, it hadn’t.

\--

That summer, there were battles and skirmishes all over Wizarding Britain. To Severus’s relief, his children participated in none of them. He fought in two, both draws where no one was killed, one just outside Hogsmede and the other, bafflingly, in rural, muggle, Wales. Lily stayed with the ministry, still investigating internal corruption, but imperiused officials seemed to be appearing faster than she could identify them. Kingsley stayed as well, doing all he could. Vera packed her bags and went to Canada. She and Kingsley both understood that sometimes, one had to choose the battles they could win. Sirius was held hostage by the Wizengamot, which struggled not to fold under the chaos that surrounded it. Dumbledore had left a great moral hole in the core of wizarding governance. 

James and Severus both fought in the war as they waited for the Hogwarts term to resume. With McGonagall to become the new Headmistress, James would be taking her post as Transfiguration Professor, while Severus was planning to wrench potions from Slughorn’s grubby hands if it killed him. Remus, conversely, fought with no expectation of a return to normal life. Severus was only glad that Dumbledore was dead and couldn’t talk him into going undercover with the werewolves, as he had in the last war. This time, he only fought as a normal Wizard would have been asked, and he had a partner in crime, Tonks, who he got on with like a house on fire.

\--

Harry and Neville turned 17 back to back, on the 30th and 31st of July, and on the 31st shared a joint birthday party hosted in their back garden, to give Molly Weasley a respite from hosting duties before the next day’s wedding. Neville received a watch belonging to his father, which a thoughtful Alice had left in a vault for him, as well as the Complete Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs and Fungi, a samples collection kit, a complete set of defensive robes, and a rude-looking book from Ron that made him blush so hard he nearly turned purple, among other things. Harry received a watch that had belonged to James’s father, a prank kit, a new broom, and a copy of what looked like the same book, to similar effect, among other things. After they gave the gifts and cut the cake – a snitch surrounded by vines – there was dancing in the garden, and drinking. Sirius spun Remus around in an off-tempo waltz, while Hermione tried to teach Marley and Ginny some of the finer points of muggle dancing. 

And then the Minister for Magic showed up, and the mood turned rather sour. He demanded to speak to Harry, Neville, Ron, and Hermione alone, and after a time, they acquiesced to his request, although they had made no promises about the use of extendable ears, and the marauders – such as they remained – sat together at the top of the stairs and listened. 

He was executing Dumbledore’s will, it seemed. To Ron, he left a ‘deluminator’, a device Severus vaguely recalled having seen before. To Hermione, a book of children’s stories, which seemed strange. To Harry, even more strangely, a snitch he’d caught in first year, and to Neville,

“A cup.” The minister paused, significantly. It was evident he’d brought forth the item. 

Harry recognized it first. “This is the cup that you drank from in first year, in Regulus’s test.” In the disastrous Philosopher’s Stone Incident. 

Neville was also left the sword of Godric Gryffindor, which was not handed over due to not belonging to Dumbledore in the first place. 

“He really was mad,” said Sirius, looking displeased by what they’d learned. 

“No, said Remus, “he must have had a plan.” 

\--

Bill and Fleur’s wedding ceremony was long and dull, but the party was lovely. Severus ended up seated at a table with Jenny and Kingsley, and after dinner, he danced with Lily, and then with James, enjoying the evening air.

There was a sense of forboding, even then. They all knew that Harry and Neville had some sort of plan with their friends, related to whatever Dumbledore had told them over the last year. Ron was involved, based on his mother’s expression, and Hermione too. Severus had gone to check the wards on her family’s home, only to find her parents vanished. He hoped that wherever they were, it was safer than here.

He was dancing with Jenny, chatting about Rita Skeeter’s new book on Dumbledore, when Mad-Eye’s patronus burst in and told them that the minister was dead. Without a second thought, he tightened his grip on Jenny and apparated them home. James appeared just a second later, holding Marley with one hand and Remus with the other.

Sirius appeared a moment later, wand drawn and looking shaken, but, although they waited up until the sun rose the next morning, Lily, Harry, and Neville never made an appearance.

\--

_James, Severus,_

_If you can read this diary, you’ve already identified the old, familiar spell, and guessed the password. I don’t think Regulus was ever there for the brief, regrettable period where Sirius thought to call me ‘Birdbrain’, and I trust Padfoot and Moony enough, in spite of all the ways we’ve been betrayed in the past._

_I don’t know how this war will go, or if I’ll survive it, but I wanted to put enough of myself into this so that if I don’t, you’ll have something left. I’ll try to leave it somewhere for you, someday soon, although I hope I see you first._

_I always knew Harry was one for mad plans, but hiding from Regulus in his own house… it’s either terrible or brilliant. He hasn’t been here for a while, certainly, and Kreacher hasn’t either. Dobby, who you may recall as the House Elf Neville freed in 2nd year, is still here, but he’s free, and more loyal to Neville than to Reg, anyways. As for the house… much as it’s Regulus’s home, it’s still Sirius’s house, and I think the magic can sense that Harry is his godson, can sense that now that Regulus has betrayed us, Harry is Sirius's true heir. That matters._

_Once they realized they were stuck with me for the duration, the children finally, finally told me what’s going on. Voldemort has ‘horcruxes’, a kind of cursed artifact created with death that make their creator unable to die. The diary Neville destroyed in 2nd year was one. We have another, the one Dumbledore died to retrieve. A locket that once belonged to Salazar Slytherin. It doesn’t seem to possess people, but it does make the wearer feel awful._

_If there’s a way to destroy them, we don’t know what it is, but we’re scouring the Black family library for ideas. I’ve tried everything in my repertoire, and Hermione has tried everything in hers._

_And then there’s the gifts from Dumbledore in the will. The Deluminator seems to be exactly what it says, but the other three gifts… there’s a mystery there. Hermione has been looking for code in the tales, but hasn’t found anything. The snitch, we haven’t found anything unique about either. Perhaps meant to be a reminder of happier times?_

_And then the damned cup. They’re all sure it was the one from Regulus’s potions trial. We’ll see what we can come up with. I’ll write here anything we find._

_I love you both so much. I have for more than half my life, and I am grateful to have been your wife._

_Give all my love to Remus and Sirius and Kingsley, and to our beautiful girls._

_Lily Evans_

\--

It was surprisingly easy to convince Marley and Jenny that they weren’t going after the rest of the family. Not that it was safer at home, exactly, but looking for them could only bring more danger, and the reality was that the Potter name and Prince blood kept them relatively safe. It was muggleborns and their parents who were in the most danger, except, perhaps, for Neville himself. And Neville would only worry if he knew Marley or Jenny were in danger. So, James and Severus had patted themselves on the back and been sure that their argument was a compelling one. 

\--

It turned out, of course, that Jenny had been waiting only because she’d found much bigger fish to fry. 

“You are not going back to Hogwarts!” 

“Merlin’s saggy ballsack I’m not!”

“Language!”

That only got a two-finger salute from Jenny, who turned back to James with her arms crossed and her expression entirely Lily’s. “The rules say you have to send me back, or else we have to go on the run, which is pointless. I’m still a Slytherin. Hogwarts is the safest place in Britain for me. Uncle Regulus won’t let anything happen to me.”

Even before her sorting, Regulus had been Jenny’s personal hero. Her godfather. Severus wanted to wring his neck for letting her down. “Jens-”

Marley, leaning against the doorframe, said, “I’ll bet that’s what Dumbledore thought too. Worked out great for him.”

“He just wouldn’t do something like that without a reason!”

“Well he did!”

Jenny’s hiss at that was a sound of visceral anger, and she stormed from the room in full fourth-year fury, up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door shut behind her. They thought the battle was won then, although they hated the cost.

\--

But Jenny dug her heels in and refused to budge, and as September grew closer, all the evidence of her returning to school was there, book lists and an order form for new robes and a steady stream of owl post delivering parcels containing everything she needed for the new year. 

Marley, of course, was the question, but when Molly wrote to tell them that Ginny was going back – Ron was not, on account of ‘Spattergroit’ – the matter was settled. Marley would not, ever, leave Ginny and Jenny there alone.

And she had a personal mission of her own, too. Severus caught her flipping her ‘Defense Association’ badge over and over between her fingers. It still displayed the date of last year’s final meeting, after their battle in the corridors. She was the same age now as Harry had been when he started the club. On the back of her hand, the silvery-white ‘I must not tell lies’ scar was stark against her brown skin. 

“It was never much a question for you either, was it?” She shook her head. “You know that you don’t have to do this?”

She gave him a very teen eyeroll. “Gryffindors. Of course I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do anything. But if you think for one instant that I don’t want to do this, then you’re just as dumb as they are.”

Severus put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, and I love you. No matter what happens. You know that?”

She nodded, and set her shoulders with determination. “Most of my friends can’t come back to school this year. But some of them can. Ginny can. Luna can. Jenny can. And… I have to be there. Harry isn’t there to lead us, and Neville isn’t there to tell us when we’re being idiots, and someone has to look after them.”

And for whatever reason, Marley had decided that person was her. “You’re a good kid, Marls.”

She pulled him into a tight hug, and he could tell that she was trying not to let him see her cry.

\--  
_  
Marlene Lily Potter,_

_I’m so damn proud of you, Marls. I think sometimes, you feel like you slip between the cracks, because of the way your siblings are, but the truth is that if you ever do end up slipping into the cracks, it’s because you’re the glue that holds people together. You have a remarkable love and loyalty in you, and a determination that makes me proud to be your mother. I think the world of you, and I know that you are so very loved, by all of us. You make our lives better just by existing in them_

_I love you more than any of these words can say._

_Your mum,_

_Lily_

\--

James and Sirius took the children to the station together, because they were purebloods, and when they came home, Severus had to inform them that Lily’s sister and her husband had been murdered by deatheaters, over a war neither of them knew a single thing about.

\--

_Dear Papa and Dad,_

_They searched the train for Neville, top to bottom. Honestly it was… kind of funny? Jenny and I made it through safe, and are at Hogwarts now. I saw Regulus, and didn’t hit him. Slughorn is head of Slytherin now, and there are two Carrows on staff for DADA and Muggle Studies._

_Not sure if they’ll let this letter through, hope they do though._

_Love you both,_

_Marley_

\--

On September 14th, Mad-Eye Moody was killed defending three muggleborn wizards from unlawful arrest.

\--

_Severus, James,_

_What would you do if you found out a secret and didn’t know who left it for you to find?_

_We finally worked out the riddle of Neville’s cup. It was just the same as the original puzzle. You had to fill it with any liquid – water worked, so did tea – and pass it to someone else. After they drained it, the words ‘it is somewhere only you will think to look’ appeared. What a pointless, unhelpful riddle.  
_  
\--

In October, Jenny and Marley attempted to steal the Sword of Godric Gryffindor from Regulus’s office, and were tortured in punishment, and James and Severus had to sit there and read about it in their letters. 

\--  
_  
Jennifer Sarah Potter,_

_Here is a confession: when the letter came to tell us you were in Slytherin, I was not surprised at all. We always knew you were smart and curious, and I think Ravenclaw would have suited you well, but you always had a drive to something more. Sometimes that has made me afraid for you. But it has also made me fiercely proud. I have never known you to back down from a fight. I was proud when you spoke up for Neville when his Great-Uncles were being especially loathsome. I was proud every fight you got into 1st year with some bigoted asshole – and Regulus told me all of them, I assure you – and I was proud when you told Dolores Umbridge the truth, even if I was furious that you were hurt. There is an ambition in wanting to change the world._

_Jenny, my brilliant, wonderful, terrifying girl, I love you. There’s nothing more to say than that._

_Your mum,_

_Lily_

\--

In November, Sirius was almost arrested while appearing before the Wizengamot, and, after fighting his way free with Kingsley’s help, they officially went into hiding. When James and Severus next heard his voice, it was coming through the airwaves. Order members arrived at their house, like clockwork, collecting potions from the cellar. There were never enough.

James, who also held a seat on the Wizengamot, stayed where he was, to do what little he could.

\--

_Fuck this fucking necklace. It makes everyone into miserable assholes._

\--

At Christmas, Marley and Jenny didn’t come back from Hogwarts, and didn’t send reasons explaining why. James went out to fight deatheaters in Diagon Alley, and Severus went on a six-day undercover mission where he stayed in animagus form in the ministry, hiding in that awful statue of muggle servitude and watching what was really going on. When he returned, half the street had been blown up – the Kneazle was fine, off in Remus’s care – and it was evident that Harry, Neville and Lily had been there.

\--

_We figured out a piece of the riddle. It led us home, as you probably noticed on account of everything having exploded. It turns out Dumbledore’s riddle – we did need to fill it with a plant-based potion, and then we got a second line – meant he’d buried the sword in Neville’s herb garden. It was quite a ways down. I wonder how he got through the wards without us noticing. We’d moved back to the wartime wards by then, surely._

_While we were here, Hermione wanted to go see Bathilda, to ask her about her own gift from Dumbledore. She and Neville went in while Harry and I were digging, and, uh, apparently Bathilda was killed and replaced by some kind of snake monster? Neville says the snake is called Nagini._

_Nobody was hurt except for the fact that Neville’s wand is broken. I’ve given him mine to use, but without the twinned cores, it isn’t really the same thing. I thought about going home to get Frank’s for him, but I can’t see that suiting any better, and I don’t want to rain any more destruction on your heads._

_Where were Jenny and Marley? Where were you? What happened?_

\--

In January, the blackmail notice arrived informing them that Marley had been arrested. No mention of Jenny was made. They were asked to hand over their wands and to inform the ministry what, exactly, had Neville Longbottom and his friends been doing in their house at Christmas. 

James went to the ministry on the appointed day, to turn himself in. The ministry were quite confused to find him and not Severus, and missed the small animagus camouflaged in the grotesques. They did not miss the grown wizard who set fire to much of their paperwork, stole several classified files, and apparated James Potter to safety. They did not return to their home in Godric’s Hollow, what little of it remained, after that. 

\--

_We destroyed the Locket. Which just leaves the question… where are the others? We must have been to dozens of sites by now, and just… nothing. Neville and Harry are both floundering. I can tell. Ron and Hermione have both been godsends lately. He rejoined us after Christmas, but didn’t have any word of any of you, except that you hadn’t gone into hiding and the girls were still at school._

\--

In February, they broke into Azkaban with Sirius and Remus. Marley was not being held there, but a large number of muggleborns and their families were. They could feel good about the final result, even if James and Severus both left feeling increasingly disheartened. 

\--

In March, Remus’s friend Tonks had her baby and declared him the godfather. This made the child Marley’s godsibling, a reminder which left all of them the worse for wear. 

Jenny hadn’t had a godmother. Regulus and Kingsley had both been her godfathers, so they wouldn’t have to choose. It was a silly thing to fixate on, but Severus couldn’t stop thinking about it. Marley was probably alive, if they wanted to hold her as leverage, but where was Jenny? Why had there been no mention of her?

Remus’s hand came down on his shoulder then. He was grinning, the most exhilarated expression of joy Severus had ever seen on his face. 

“You have to come with me, now.”

\--

They were all at Shell Cottage, with Bill and Fleur, except for Jenny. Everyone was the worse for wear – Neville had no wand, Lily had a bloody wound down her arm, Harry had a bruise across his entire face, and Marley hadn’t seen the sun in months – but they were there. They could touch them, and hold them and know that they were alive.

And there was word of Jenny too, a little. Marley thought she was safe, at the least. She and Luna Lovegood both agreed that Jenny had never arrived at the Hogwarts express, which was where they had been arrested, and both of them had been questioned about her absence on multiple occasions. 

“Maybe being a Slytherin really did protect her,” she said, sitting at Severus’s side and watching the sunset. “Or maybe she just… worked out what they were going to do, but couldn’t warn us in time. I don’t know.”

Perhaps, Severus thought grimly, Regulus had come through in his godfatherly duties after all.

\--

_Mum, Dad, Papa,_

_I’m sorry that we’re doing this, but I promise it’s the best option. We have enough wands, and Polyjuice to cover the four of us, but this is something we need to do alone. We love you, and we’ll see you soon._

_Harry & Neville_

\--

“They broke into Gringotts without us? I’m going to kill them.”

“‘Without us’ is the least concerning part of that sentence, Sirius”

\--

When they were called by Aberforth to come to Hogwarts and fight, the very last thing they expected to see, upon crawling into the castle was Jenny and Ginny Weasley – who had failed to return for spring break – sitting and holding court in a room that had a certain Narnia flare to it.

“Welcome,” said Jenny, with a theatrical hand gesture, “to Cair Paravel. Better known as the Room of Requirement. I’ll be your host, Jennifer Potter, and with me as ever, my co-Queen, Ginevra Weasley.”

She might very well have continued monologuing in that theatrical vein if James had not swept her off her feet in a hug. 

\--

While they waited for the rest of the order to arrive, and James and Lily went in search of their elder two scoundrel children, Jenny explained to him what had happened. 

“That last morning, right before we got on the train, Draco Malfoy cornered me in the common room. He said that I wasn’t going to enjoy where the train was going. So I went to the Room of Requirement, and I just stayed there. The House Elves helped me, brought me food and news, and helped me bring other people in when they needed it.”

That reminded him of something Lily had mentioned, from her time staying at Grimmauld Place. “Where was Kreacher?”

Jenny looked down at her hands. “He was there, sometimes. The others never let him see me, but… he must have known. I think… maybe he justified it because Sirius is the head of the family. I don’t know.”

Something didn’t quite add up. In fact, several somethings.

\-- 

Having narrowly escaped with their lives from the flaming room, Severus pressed his wand to Malfoy’s neck. He’d tried to kill them only moments ago, but he had also saved Jenny, and, if Harry was to be believed, had lied to protect them when they were captured by Deatheaters.

“There’s a secret tunnel,” he said, and described the location of the collapsed tunnel behind the mirror on the 4th floor. “Go there, ward the entrance, and stay. When the fighting dies down, if we win, you can tell them I told you the location and they’ll believe you. If we lose, tell them I made you go there. Do you understand?”

Malfoy nodded, and with a little legilimancy, Severus could see that he meant it. He let the boy up, and watched him run off in the appropriate direction.

Harry, Neville, Hermione and Ron had all vanished, and he was left alone in a half-destroyed hallway with Fred and Percy Weasley, both of them looking the worse for wear.

“Did they…”

Both Weasleys just shrugged.

\--

The brief armistice found Severus back in the great hall, searching the room for any sign of his partners or children. He counted up each of the Weasleys, huddled around Arthur’s body, and then approached Sirius, who he saw curled against a wall. 

“Remus?”

He shook his head and pointed nearby, to where the body of Tonks lay. “I haven’t seen Remus.”

Severus left him there, and soon, with aching relief, was able to point Remus in his direction. He waved to Kingsley standing and issuing orders, and then, 

“Oh,” he said, and knelt beside James, who was sitting, head in his hands, next to the body of Minerva McGonagall. 

It wasn’t hard to determine what had happened. James had been her prodigy. The prodigal son. And Minerva had loved him very well. They all knew that.

And then he spotted Lily, standing between Harry and Neville. Harry and Lily soon came over to James, to be with him, but Neville stood, frozen, and Severus could read his mind without having to use legilimancy. He’d always hated the idea that people might die for him.

“Come on,” he said, and put his arm around Neville’s shoulders, “let’s get out of here.”

And Neville led him up to the Headmaster’s office, and told him that Regulus was dead. “Voldemort killed him. Just before the fighting stopped. He used Nagini to do it.”

And then he produced a vial of memories, and they went into the pensieve together.

\--

And there was Regulus, standing there in just the same office. He looked to be still in his early twenties, and he was wearing his professor’s robes. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, hands twisting nervously at his sides, “but I can’t stay here while Sirius and Remus are hurting. They’d be there for me, if our positions were reversed. I know they would.”

Why had Regulus chosen this to show to Neville? Why this memory? Neville had only been a baby at the time, but he certainly knew the story of Regulus’s aborted first attempt at teaching.

“Very well,” said Dumbledore, “but I will have need of you here, some day. I believe you are the only one who can fulfil an important duty for me.”

Regulus seemed so wary and worn. It was how they had all looked, in those awful days. “What?”

Dumbledore stood from behind his desk. Fawkes fluttered over to perch on his shoulder and played with his hair while he looked out the window. “I believe Voldemort will return. When that day comes… I will need someone to infiltrate his side, to gain his confidences. I believe you can do that.”

Severus kept his face a careful mask so Neville couldn’t see the hole these words had torn at the very center of him. 

Regulus, wary, said, “I can’t do that.”

Dumbledore countered, “you must. It is the only way to ensure Mr. Longbottom’s safety.”

The memory dissolved. Together, they watched Regulus grow older, begin to believe that Voldemort was never coming back. They watched him begin to forgive himself for Barty’s treachery. 

And then he came upon Quirrell making an attempt to steal the philosopher’s stone while his troll attacked the students. And Regulus dropped to one knee, and called the ghost ‘Master’, and promised to help it get through his barrier. 

Voldemort hadn’t trusted him then. It was obvious. But Regulus told beautiful lies. He spun dreams the way he had for Severus as a boy, talking about House Elf liberation and creature rights and every ambition he had never fulfilled. But here the dreams he spoke of were dark, of domination and subjugation and of making his mother proud. 

\--

He really didn’t know what was going on with Harry in second year, and they watched him spit vitriol at Dumbledore after the truth came out, pound the desk with his hands while the old wizard sat, serene and unphased.

\--

He whispered, “Dumbledore wants something from me, and I’m not sure I know how to give it.”

And a memory of Severus answered back, “do I get to know what it is?”

\--

Regulus had been there, in the graveyard, after Voldemort returned to life, had watched Neville suffer and had done nothing but subtly brighten the sheen on the trophy with a flick of his wand so Neville might remember that it was a portkey.

\--

Narcissa had come to him in the dead of night. She had pleaded with her cousin, who was Slytherin but good, to save her son, and he had sworn to do so. It had been the perfect excuse. Family loyalty could close the circle, could explain his treachery in a way Voldemort would find mythic, poetic, and perfectly comprehensible. 

\--

Neville took his hand, as they watched Dumbledore, deathly sick, tell Regulus to kill him. He watched the ensuing argument, where they discussed Horcruxes, whatever those were, and how Neville was one, and how the only way to end it was for him to die. 

They watched Regulus scream and rage and throw things at Dumbledore. And cry. 

\--

And they watched him come to terms with what had to be done, and set the plan in motion. He’d killed Dumbledore, of course. That part was obvious. The hard part had been conducted later, while everyone else was occupied at the funeral. Regulus had, with help from Kreacher, altered part of Dumbledore’s will to add the gift of the goblet for Neville. He had obscured with his changes a line about how Harry and Neville should share their gifts, as they had always worked together before. Then, he’d gone to Godric’s Hollow, where the wards didn’t block a house elf who technically obeyed Sirius, and had buried the sword there, trusting it to stay until it was needed. 

\--

Regulus been well aware that Neville was hiding at Number 12, and had instructed Kreacher to look out for him, and for Marlene and Jenny.

He’d summoned Malfoy to his office, had casually mentioned to the boy he knew was having doubts that the Potter children would be taken the following morning. Jenny had been right to believe that he would protect her. Her trust was founded. 

\--

Barty Crouch had died, choked by his own hand, on the floor of Malfoy Manor, and Regulus had stood over the body, and if he wept it was for himself.

\--

“Neville,” Severus said, as he landed, disjointedly, back in his own body. But Neville genuinely startled him. 

“Petrificus totalus!” He shouted, and the spell caught Severus full in the side, sending him crashing back against the bookcase. 

His body utterly still, he watched Neville kneel beside him, tears running freely from his face. “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry. Tell Mum and Dad and Jenny and Marley that I love them.”

He straightened, and Severus could no longer see his face. To himself, seemingly, Neville said, “he changed the will. He’s supposed to share the snitch with me.”

And then, with one final, “I’m sorry,” he was gone.

\--

Voldemort’s voice was high and cruel as he announced, “Neville Longbottom is dead,” and Severus, wandless, wordless, motionless, broke free from his bonds, grabbed his wand, and ran down the stairs from the headmaster’s office, as hard and as fast as he had run in all his life, to hear the tail end of Lily’s scream reverberating as he tore through the entrance hall.

He came into the crowd to find that Harry was standing between them and Voldemort, wandless. Neville’s body lay curled on the ground at the feet of the man responsible for all of this, and Severus could feel his ears pounding. He would have leapt forward then, to do something stupid and terrible, if Remus had not grabbed him and pulled him back. 

“You are the scion of very old and powerful magic,” Voldemort was saying to Harry, “one who I know very well, I believe. You have been a loyal servant before. Pettigrew and Crouch both suggested that you were powerful at defensive magics. Stronger than the Longbottom boy. You would make a very good deatheater.”

Harry shifted backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet, an almost fey posture that displayed nothing of nervousness or fear. “That’s a very generous compliment. But I’m not sure ‘fascist lacky’ would look very good on my uni applications.”

And Sirius laughed, standing just behind Severus. He laughed, and Voldemort’s face turned ruinously murderous like Severus had never seen. 

“So be it,” he said, and Severus missed the next several seconds of monologuing as he engaged in a wrestling match with Remus. Given the unfair advantage of natural werewolf strength, he lost. When he looked back up, his son was standing in a column of fire, and even Remus could not hold him back. 

At that very same moment, a terrible caterwauling came from the forest, and then the centaurs were there, and the giants were fighting each other, and there was utter chaos as Severus shoved to the front of their group, and Lily drew her wand at his side, and all around them the battle recommenced. 

And Harry, who had been a practicing occlumens since the age of 13, broke free from whatever spell Voldemort had him under, pulled the flaming sorting hat from his head, the sword of Godric Gryffindor from within the hat, and, darting forward, slashed it up through the neck of Voldemort’s snake with the same practiced, athletic ease he brought to all his Quidditch games.

Voldemort let out an ungodly shriek, and, when Severus was finally able to tear his eyes away from Harry, he realized that Neville’s body had vanished, and he felt a grin begin to spread, unchecked, across his face.

\--

Voldemort spat out the killing curse, and for the second time that night, Neville raised his wand and said, “petrificus totalus”

It turned out that the spell didn’t really matter. Voldemort’s curse rebounded, as it had so many years ago, and he fell to ground, finally and truly dead. People shivered backwards, afraid of the terrible display of power they had just witnessed.

Bare seconds later, Severus had bolted across the room from where he stood with Remus over Fenrir Greyback’s body, wrapping Neville in a fierce embrace and whispering, “I forgive you,” after his every apology, and, “I love you,” into the silences when he said nothing at all. 

Harry nearly shoved Severus out of the way to wrap his arms around Neville, whispering something about, “did you use it?”

Neville’s answer, it seemed, was for his ears alone. The truth of what had been concealed in Harry’s snitch, and what Neville had done with it, was one that Severus never learned.

\--

It poured with rain on the day they buried Regulus Black. The crowd was nothing like the one Minerva McGonagall had received, with decades’ worth of students who had loved her fiercely. Nor did it compare to Arthur Weasley’s, with his family crowded tight together, nor Nymphodora Tonks’s, where she was posthumously awarded a service medal for her work as an auror, and everyone stared at Remus holding baby Teddy in his arms. At that very moment, the baby looked so much like him that if Severus hadn’t known better he would have said the relationship was biological.

Regulus’s funeral was attended by a scant few people. Even those who knew intellectually his true allegiance rarely found it in themselves to forgive him. So his funeral was small. The Marauders and all their various children. A newly returned Vera. Ginny had come with Harry, and Marley had brought Luna Lovegood. Kreacher, perhaps the last person in the world whose feelings about Regulus were utterly uncomplicated, joined them.

And then there were the other members of the Black family, such as they remained. Andromeda, of course, and Draco. Narcissa remained under house arrest, and Lucius in Azkaban. There had never been a moment of true awkwardness quite like Draco’s arrival, but Jenny had beckoned to him, and he had sat beside her, quiet as a mouse, throughout the ceremony. He’d mattered to Regulus, some way or another, so it made sense to have him there. 

Sirius spoke first, of Regulus, his brother. Then Kreacher, a few words about Regulus as a model pureblood, irony of ironies. And then Jenny stood, and made her way to the front of the church. There was a green trim on her black dress, and the soles of her shoes squeaked from being wet. 

“Regulus Black was my godfather,” she said, firmly, and, eyes on Malfoy, added, “and he was yours too, I think.” This, Severus had never known. “He had no children of his own. He never married. But he had so much love in his heart, and he would do anything for it. Regulus dedicated his life to trying to make the world a better place, and he knew he wouldn’t get glory for it, or be remembered for it, but he did it for us. Because he loved us. And I think the best thing we can do now, the only thing we can do, is love as fiercely, and with as much dedication, as he did.”

When she sat back in her seat, the Malfoy boy passed her his handkerchief, and Harry gave him a look that wasn’t seethingly furious for once. 

\--

_Dear Severus,_

_I wonder what world this letter will be opened into? I am not so much of a fool as to believe I will be there to see it. But I try to hold on to hope. I hope that you have survived, and that James and Lily are with you. I hope Sirius is there to curse my name, with Remus at his side. I hope they will all understand that I could not leave too many letters, in avoidance of suspicions. I have such hopes for your children. For Harry, and Marley, and for Jenny. I hope you won’t begrudge my leaving her everything. I think the title of Lady Black would suit her in a way it never would Harry, in a way it never has Sirius. I hope Sirius sees that too. As for Neville, oh how I hope. It is all I can do for him. He received a miracle once. A beautiful, tragic miracle. I hope that lightning might strike twice. If anyone deserves that, Neville does._

_What I have done is inexcusable, but… know that every choice I made, I made with the intent to protect you. I cannot ask for your forgiveness, but never feel guilt as I have. You did nothing wrong by me. Not ever. Not any of you. You are not responsible for a single one of my actions._

_Your friend,_

_RAB_

\--

At the end of the summer, before the children went back to school, they had a party in the mostly-restored garden of their home in Godric’s Hollow. Everyone was there. Marauders and Weasleys and associated friends. Marley and Luna were slow dancing, even though nobody was playing any music. Sirius was playing with Teddy, whose hair and face shifted as he giggled. Remus was watching fondly, standing by the punchbowl, and Severus knew, from a conversation they’d had a few days ago, that he had a ring in his pocket. Somebody, probably Jenny, had invited Draco Malfoy, and to Severus’s great surprise, he was sitting with Ginny and Harry, looking… rather calm. Harry was smiling, looking between the two of them with something like wonder. Severus wouldn’t have gone so far as to predict a spring wedding, but he thought Harry might be on track to prove himself, once again, an inescapable carbon copy of James.

James was in the kitchen with Molly Weasley, making something that smelled delicious, and through the open doorframe Severus was leaning against, he could hear the faint sounds of their conversation. It was strange to think that James was going to be a professor at Hogwarts next year. But not nearly as strange as the fact that Severus himself was. Aurora Sinestra was to be head of Slytherin house, naturally, but Severus was going to be the Potions Master. Dumbledore, he thought, would have been smug about that.

And there was Lily, sitting with Kingsley and Vera. Lily was wearing a tanktop, and the deep scar of ‘mudblood’ was plainly visible on her arm. But she carried no shame, and Severus loved that about her. He loved everything about her.

There was a shriek from Jenny just then, who ducked out of the way of a rocket that narrowly missed her head to the Weasley twins’ matching yells of “our bad!” echoing from behind Severus’s shed. It was a good thing he hadn’t begun any new experiments since the reconstruction had finished. 

Neville came out of the house beside Severus, and leaned against the opposite side of the door frame. They watched Jenny grab her wand and chase the twins through the garden, over the fence, and into the back lane.

“How are you holding up?”

If it had been hard for Neville to carry the world, the residual weight of having carried it was not much lighter. But today he smiled, broad and bright. 

“With Malfoy here, they don’t need me for even numbers for the Quidditch game.”

It was a small thing, but if it was enough to make Neville smile, then it was more than enough. “Seeker, I believe? What are Harry’s odds like?”

“Ginny and Malfoy are going to wipe the floor with him. About time too, really.”

And they stood there and people-watched until James called them both in to carry dishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *takes a bow* thank you. The 7th year stuff is probably my favourite section of this fic, so I hope you liked it! Next Friday, I’ll be posting a brief coda from Harry’s POV, 1 year later, ft. Ginny and Draco. So stay tuned for that

**Author's Note:**

> Link: https://mermaidsuk.org.uk
> 
> This is my Christmas gift work, dedicated to everyone who asked for it. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. The second part will be posted when it is complete, probably in early January, so stay tuned for Harry and Neville’s 3rd-7th years, and for more Marley and Jenny when they start getting involved with the plot (I think you’re really going to like both of them)


End file.
